A Colder Shade of Pale
by atippleofyourtears
Summary: When children in the town of Burgess are found frozen to death in their beds, the Winchesters go on the hunt for the creature responsible. Local lore tells of Burgess being the origin place of the winter spirit known as Jack Frost, and thinking he's the killer, the boys set out to put Jack down for his final rest. Jack, however, has other plans...
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **Just for reference, this fic takes place several years post-movie for Rise of the Guardians, and season 2ish for Supernatural. Please keep in mind I've only watched the first two seasons of Supernatural and relied on wiki for more canon knowledge, so some things might still be off. If they are, I apologize for it, and just chalk it up to this being an AU mashup universe, where the world mechanics mesh a bit, muddying up the waters for what's canon in both.

Which also means Jack himself might not be exactly the same as in the movie. I'll just leave that little fact dangling ominously.

* * *

**A Colder Shade of Pale**

**by Saphie**

* * *

**Chapter One**

**1992**

Dean thought he'd done everything right. He was sure of it. When their dad had left them at the cabin to go on his hunting trip, he'd done everything his dad had told him to do. He'd even set some traps of his own, little mechanical monsters, things with jagged metal edges and broken glass that could hurt anything that could feel pain.

Still, they'd gotten in. They'd gotten in through the chimney and they'd knocked away the gun his father had left him and they'd knocked him and Sammy to the floor and now they were laughing and he was fighting and it probably wasn't going to matter that he was.

"Dean! Dean!"

"Let him go! Let my brother go!"

"He's a little on the shrimpy side, so tell you what - you stop trying to kick me in the face, kid, and I'll let your little brother live. He doesn't look like good eatin' anyway."

Dean went still, completely still.

"That's a good boy. I promise you, I'm a monster of my word. You just keep still while I kill you. You can scream, though; feel free to scream all you like."

"Dean!" Tears were streaming down Sammy's face where he was pinned to the ground by the other demon. "Don't hurt him!"

"Please don't make him watch," Dean begged. "I won't fight, I swear, but please don't make him watch."

"I said I'd let him live, kid. The only way it'd be worth it is if I got to make him watch me rip you apart. That's what I wanna leave your father for what he did to us - both of his sons in pieces, even if it's not in the same way."

Bright teeth gleamed in the light, and the man - the monster - raised a hand that sprouted jagged claws -

- and then his head promptly exploded into bloody fragments, causing blood to spray all over Dean's face.

In the doorway of the cabin, John Winchester cocked his shotgun again, pointing it at the demon pinning down his other son. Before it could make a move, it was blasted back, a bloody hole now gaping in its chest. Taking out his sidearm, he finished the job, putting two bullets between its eyes.

Dean sat up, shoving the corpse of the demon off of himself, shaking the blood and brains from his arms with a grossed out expression, as John raced over to his younger son, dropping to his knees next to him to scoop him off the ground and into his arms.

"It's alright. It's alright, Sammy. Dean, are you hurt?"

"No, dad, I'm fine -"

"I told you to stay inside! I told you to stay inside, to line all the windows with salt -"

"We did!"

"Then how did they get in?"

"I don't know. I don't know, dad. I did everything you told me to do, the salt, the holy water, I even made some traps -"

"You must have missed something. I told you to double and triple check it, I told you -"

Where Sam knelt, shaking in his father's arms, he buried his face in his father's chest and said, in a plaintive wail, "It's all my fault."

"What do you mean it's your fault?" John asked him.

"I took the traps for the chimney down," said Sam.

"Sam," John said, taking his son by the shoulders to look him in the eyes. "Why would you do that? I told you how dangerous it was."

"I just -" Sam gulped down air, trying to stop his crying. "It's Christmas Eve. I just wanted to make sure Santa could come."

It was only last year that Sam had found out about his father's hunting trips, about what had really happened to their mother. Before that, he'd never believed in Santa. This was the first Christmas_ after_ he'd found his father's journal and Dean had explained everything, after he'd told him that monsters and make believe things were real.

So Sam believed that maybe other make believe things were real too, too. If all the bad things were real, shouldn't some of the good make-believe things be real, too?

"I thought...I thought if everything else is real, Santa might be, too, and with all the traps and the salt and everything, what if the reason he's never come is because he could never get in?"

John sighed as he looked his youngest son in the eyes, but Sam couldn't look at his father without flinching - and there was someone else he wanted to focus on more. Breaking free from his father's grip, he went over to Dean, throwing his arms around him.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just wanted to see Santa, I'm sorry."

Dean hugged him back. "It's okay, Sammy. I'm not hurt."

"You're just slimy."

"Yeah," said Dean, arms curling even more tightly around his little brother. "Yeah, I'm just slimy."

That was the day that Sam Winchester stopped believing in Santa and far north, on a globe hidden in bright place under the ice, a little light went out almost as quickly as it had flickered into being.

For Dean, who had never believed in Santa at all, it was just another day in the life of a hunter. He didn't believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy or all those other nice things, but he believed in everything else. He'd always believed, ever since that day his father had shoved little Sammy in his arms and told him to run.

You had to believe things were real so you could to kill them. And you couldn't believe the good ones existed because that's how the bad ones snuck in when your guard was down.

* * *

**Present Day**

Marissa Wilberson was six years old and that meant she knew a lot of things. She knew that Santa wasn't real, for instance. She had figured that out recently. It was just a feeling, just a strange feeling that made her stop believing one day. She'd asked her big cousin to confirm it and had been sad to be right. She knew that the Easter Bunny wasn't real, too, and that had made her even sadder.

She also knew that something was scratching at the window outside her window at night and that it wasn't nice.

Her mommy and daddy didn't believe her and told her it was just bad dreams, but it was there and had been there for three nights now. Sometimes it even whispered to her through the windowpane, saying **_"Let me in"_** in a hissing voice that sounded like a teenage boy's but was as brittle as a frozen flower.

Tonight it was there again, fingers scratching at the glass, little patterns of frost spreading out from them. She knew if she told her mommy and daddy it was here that it'd be gone by the time they came to look and that they wouldn't believe her, so she simply lay there, cowering in her bed, a blanket pulled over her head.

It whispered the same whisper as it had the times before, the same creaky **_"Let me in"_** that had scared her the other nights, only now it said more things, things that weren't quite as scary.

**_"I just want to play,"_** said the voice through the glass. **_"Don't you want to have fun?" _**

Marissa finally sat up when she heard that, a little bit less afraid, enough to stop hiding under her blankets at least. In the window, she could only see the shadow of the thing but now that she thought about it, it looked more like a boy's shadow than a monster's, more like something she'd heard about from her friends at school that wasn't a monster at all.

"Are you Jack Frost?" she asked.

**_"Yes,"_** the voice said after a moment's hesitation. **_"Yes, I am." _**

"I heard from the other kids at school that you make it snow in people's rooms and that you bring all the snow days."

**_"Yes," _**the voice hissed.

"You're not supposed to be real, though. Just like Santa isn't real."

Marissa tilted her head, bringing her legs over the side of her bed and tiptoeing across the cold floor. If she had it snow in her room she could tell all the other kids at school she got to play with Jack Frost, too.

She really wanted him to be real. Maybe if he was real, all the other things were real and her cousin was wrong somehow.

"If I let you in, will you make it snow in my room?"

**_"Let me in. I'll come in and play." _**

His voice was a little strange and scary, like it was coming from the other side of a mirror if your reflection could talk, but underneath the strange echo, he sounded like just a boy and that wasn't scary at all, if Marissa really thought about it. If he was something magic, that made all the snow days and let kids have fun, then maybe that meant he just didn't have a normal voice. Maybe he had a magic voice that sounded a little funny.

The lure of something special and magical proved to be too strong to resist and overcoming her fear, Marissa stood up and walked over to the window, clutching her bunny doll to herself protectively. Slowly and cautiously, she went over to the window. Now the boy wasn't perched right on the sill like he had been. Instead he was off to the side now and she could see nothing outside but the open night sky.

Marissa unlocked the window, then scrambled back cautiously and got back up on her bed, kneeling there on the blanket, waiting for Jack to come in.

A long-fingered hand reached down and opened the window and then a dark, long-limbed shape clambered into her room, just outside the ring of light her nightlight provided.

"Are we going to play now?" she asked.

**_"We're going to have so much fun." _**

The figure suddenly smiled and though she could see nothing else about it, its teeth caught the smallest edge of light from the nightlight and gleamed just a little too bright, and looked a little too sharp and narrow, like icicles.

* * *

The screaming was what woke Mr. and Mrs. Wilberson up, becauses it was the kind of screaming no parent ever wanted to hear from their child. Immediately, the two of them toppled out of bed, going from sleeping to moving in nearly no time at all as they rushed out of their bedroom towards their daughter's.

"Marissa! Marissa!"

Mrs. Wilberson was the first to kick open the door and that was why she saw the shape in the window, a long-limbed shadow with a smile that was too bright in the dark that slipped away so quickly she thought she'd imagined it.

It was also why she was the first to see her daughter where she lay still and completely pristine on her bed, her face far too pale and glittering with ice. She fell back, screaming an anguished scream, into her husband's arms just as he started screaming, too.

* * *

"Hey Dean, check this out. We're having no luck with tracking down that shadow demon, so..."

Dean was a little too busy checking out the bacon and eggs he was stuffing into his mouth - and also the waitress that had brought the bacon and eggs - but eventually he reined his attention in to look back at his brother, who turned his laptop so Dean could see it.

The headline read:

**In-home exposure deaths of 3 children mystify local authorities**

"Saw a paper someone left on the seat and found some news reports from a town nearby online. Burgess, Pennsylvania. Over this last week, three kids were found dead in their beds, frozen to death."

"Frozen how? Are we talking the kids just left their windows open or Leggo my Eggo frozen?"

"The reports say that the kids had to be thawed out before they could even do autopsies. The were frozen_ solid_. Even though their bedroom windows were found open and it was cold outside, their parents had seen them at least an hour - and sometimes only minutes - before they were found. Nowhere near enough time for them to die of exposure and freeze that way naturally."

"Definitely something oogie going on there."

"Bigtime oogie," Sam said, turning the laptop back to face himself again.

"What are you thinking? Spirits that freeze their victims aren't that common to come by."

"But they do exist in a lot of cultures, like the Yuki-Onna in Japan."

"Snow ladies, right? They punish guys who can't keep it in their pants."

"They're also thought to freeze lost travellers or even break into homes and freeze whole families inside. They're usually women that died in the snow themselves. Even if it's not one of them, there are probably other vengeful spirits out there with the same MO."

"Makes sense. Miserable death in the cold leads to a miserable spirit, and they take out their bad days on other people instead of investing in a ghostly stress ball. Did you search for any local stuff that fits?"

"I did some research on the town to see if anything fit and apparently," Sam cocked his head in a 'lookee what I found with my nerdy nerd research skills' gesture, "local legend holds that the town is where a certain fairly famous winter spirit originated."

Sam turned his laptop around again to show a woodcut of a spindly-limbed boy that looked as if he was made of jagged ice.

"Are you telling me the people in this town think that Rankin and Bass, pointy-shoed reject is real?"

"Looks like it. Apparently, the local lore isolates Burgess as the place where several legends about Jack Frost originated. He's just a folk figure everywhere else, more a fictional character than anything, but in the last year or so, around the town, they've come to see him as more of a cryptid like the Jersey Devil or how some places see their local Woman in White. There are even websites that track supposed sightings of him. They've only sprung up recently, but they're taking this pretty seriously."

"But it's Jack freakin' Frost. That's like thinking _Santa's _real."

"Maybe they've had something real in this town, a local spirit that the lore built up around, and it spread until it turned into other legends and stories. Look at how they treat vamps in the movies, not knowing the real thing is out there. The Jack Frost legend had to start somewhere, right?"

"Alright, I guess we know where we're heading next. But our next hunt after this better not having us chasing Rudolph or Frosty the Snowman, that's all I'm saying."

Sam grinned as he packed up his laptop, and Dean continued on.

"Or Heat Miser. We're _not_ fighting Heat Miser or Snow Miser..."

* * *

The thing about belief was that the nature of it could change. The thing about beings that were sustained on belief was that when it changed, they could _feel_ it change.

The figure that perched on the chimney of the Wilberson house held its hand to its chest as it perched there, listening to the despondent sobs coming from the parents' bedroom. Eventually they went quiet and the shadow-shape swung down to the window and perched on the sill, looking in through the glass at an area no longer cordoned off with police tape, where pink pony figures lined shelves and stickers had been placed on walls.

Silently, the figure peered into the room, taking everything in - especially the emptiness.

Then it noticed the glass of the window, cracked from extremes of cold, in shapes much like frost. Pale fingers pressing against the glass made new frost shapes emerge, filling in the cracked patterns that were there.

The figure hissed.

Mrs. Wilberson heard the hiss through the glass of the window as she passed by the doorway of what had been her daughter's room, on the way back from the bathroom with tissues. She quickly turned around at the noise, throwing herself in through the doorway, just in time to see a long-limbed shape disappear from window again, like she had the night her daughter died.

This time, she got a better look, though. This time she was absolutely sure of what she'd seen. It had been a boy, a pale boy with spider-like limbs and a blue hoodie. Racing over to the window, she peered out and saw a flitting shape in the trees outside, holding what looked like a staff, disappearing into the treetops.

Looking down, she saw that the window had been frosted over, and there were little curls and fractal patterns of frost that matched the cracks, just like there had been the night her daughter was killed.

"Oh my God."

* * *

Whenever you wanted information on a killing like this, it was best to go straight to the source, and that was what brought the Winchesters to the Krupke house, where one of the victims had died.

"Hello, Mrs. Krupke, Mr. Krupke. I'm Agent Theodore Kord and this is my partner, Michael Carter," said Dean. "We're from the FBI. We were hoping to ask you a few questions about your son."

The two of them flashed their fake IDs as they stood there in the Krupke's doorway, dressed smartly in their suits.

"But we already spoke with the police," said Mrs. Krupke, confused. She was blonde, her hair messy and frazzled, sticking out in little wisps in every direction, her eyes tired and bloodshot.

"They've given us their report, but we wanted to speak to you ourselves, to see if we could turn up any fresh information," said Dean.

"I don't know if we - I don't if we can do this again," said Mr. Krupke, a stocky, balding man in his forties.

Sam gave them his gentlest, most doe-eyed look, and his voice was gentle as he spoke. The actual empathy in his voice sold it.

"Sir, ma'am, I know you've suffered a terrible loss, but sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can help turn up something new in an investigation like this, and the more information we have, the more likely we'll be able to figure out what happened to your son - and if there was foul play involved, the faster we'll be able to bring who's responsible to justice."

The couple looked at each other and silently seemed to come to an agreement.

"I suppose you can come in," said Mr. Krupke as his wife held open the door. He went off to put on some coffee, his voice fragile. "I just don't know what else there is to say."

Before long, they were settled at the kitchen table. Sam had a notepad and a pen out.  
"When was the last time you saw your son before you discovered what had happened to him?"

"It was sometime around 9:30 pm. We heard the -" Mrs. Krupke had to take a deep breath to steady herself. "We heard him screaming around ten o'clock and when we ran up to see what was wrong, he was -"

She pressed his lips together in a trembling, thin line and leaned against her husband, who put his arm around her.

"It was just a half hour, at most. And we heard him just seconds before we walked in and saw him - saw him like that."

"Was the room cold?" asked Dean.

"It was freezing," said Mr. Krupke. "And the air was so dry, like all the moisture had been sucked out of it. Even with his window open, it didn't seem right. It was colder in his room than it was outside."

"Were there any signs that there were liquids there, or vapor from something like liquid nitrogen?" asked Sam.

"No. It was just cold, and he was there on the bed, just..." Mr. Krupke couldn't finish the thought, trailing off instead into quiet misery.

"Did he mention anyone following him around? At school? When he was outside with friends?" asked Dean. "Someone that might've targeted him, wanted to hurt him?"

"If there was anyone acting strangely towards him, he didn't tell us anything," said Mrs. Krupke.

"Did he ever mention something about someone nosing around the house when they shouldn't have been? Anything that might have frightened him," asked Sam.

That made both the Krupkes pause and turn to look at each other. They turned to look back at Dean and Sam with new understanding in their expressions. Apparently, they'd tripped on something the Krupkes hadn't thought to tell the police.

"The night before, he said he thought there was something outside his window. Something that wanted him to open it. I checked, though, and there was nothing there. We figured it was just a bad dream," said Mr. Krupke.

"Did he describe what he saw?" asked Dean.

"He just said it was a voice outside in the dark and that it was scratching on the glass. A dark figure. That's all," said Mrs. Krupke.

"What did he think the voice was saying to him?" Sam asked, notebook at the ready.

"He said...it wanted him to open the window and play," Mrs. Krupke. Her lip quivered. "Do you think that might have been a person? Somehow climbing up to his window? We didn't tell the police, we just thought he was dreaming -"

"At this point in the investigation, we can't really say, Mrs. Krupke."

"It's just, if it was, we didn't believe him, we didn't believe him, so if it was, if we had -"

"Chances are, he really might have just had a nightmare, so I wouldn't fret over it just yet," said Sam. Before she could continue on such an upsetting train of thought, Sam asked, "Is there any chance we could see his room? We have all the crime scene pictures and evidence in lockup but we'd like to get a sense of the space there."

"Yes. Yes, of course."

Later, as the Krupkes sat downstairs, crying yet again because of the grief stirred up by Sam and Dean's questioning, Dean knelt to look under the kid's bed and Sam checked the bedposts to see if there was any ice damage or ritual markings.

Sam muttered to Dean, "If this thing was powerful enough to freeze someone to death, why did it need to be invited in?"

"I dunno, said Dean, waving the EMF meter under and around the bed, the ticking noise it was making unmistakable. "EMF's going crazy, though, so it can't have been some nut with liquid nitrogen or the world's most portable blast freezer."

"I'm not seeing any symbols carved anywhere or signs of black magic." Sam paused. "Wait. Over the bedroom doorway."

Sam went over and pointed out a very small symbol that had been carved into the doorframe.

"What is that?"

"I think that's a yan," Sam said, frowning.

"What's a Yanni who now?"

"It's Thai. Symbols of mystical protection against ghosts and spirits. It would have only warded the door, though, not the window. Still, somebody was expecting some kinda spirit, demon, or monster."

"Think it was the parents?"

"I doubt it. They were too shaken for people that knew this was something that could happen." Sam looked around the room, going over to the window. "Dean, look at this."

Dean stood and walked over. The window had the slightest golden tinge to it, but that was probably some kind of coating to prevent glare. There were little cracks in strange shapes all along it, spreading out from a few points. "It's cracked."

"Yeah, in the shape of frost patterns. I think it cracked because of the cold. That's a big part of the Jack Frost legend, him leaving frost patterns on the windows."

Sam looked over at his brother at the same time Dean turned to meet his gaze, raising an eyebrow just slightly.

"And if it was cold enough to stress-crack glass," said Dean, "it was cold enough to turn these kids into kidsicles."

* * *

He whispered in the childrens' ears. When they walked alone anywhere, he darted overheard from roof to roof, a flash of white and blue, watching, waiting. He caught them during moments alone, asking his quiet questions. Sometimes he hovered outside their windows at night, whispering through the glass, listening to them whisper back.

They trusted him as they always had - and that was possibly was the undoing of the ones who had died.

It was all the more reason to carry on with his plans.

* * *

"That's two families down, and the Millers didn't know much more than the Krupkes," said Dean as he and Sam walked down the sidewalk away from the Miller house, towards the Wilberson's.

"Pattern seems random, too," Sam put in "The Wilbersons are right down the street from here, right? Within walking distance. But the Krupkes are all the way across town. If there is a pattern, we haven't seen enough of it yet to figure out what it is. We need to hit the library or the town hall archives after we talk to the Wilbersons, to see if we can dig up anything on the Jack Frost legend."

"I'm still not sold on that being a real thing, Sammy. Should we focus in on it that much when we hardly have any clues on what this thing is?"

"I don't really understand why you're so skeptical about Jack Frost existing when all the other stuff we've seen exists."

"It's the _whimsy_. I just find that crap harder to believe."

"It's not exactly whimsical if he's murdering kids."

"Yeah, but if he exists then you still start getting into territory that involves things pissing fairy dust and crapping rainbows and making dreams come true. You have to consider that the other ones are real, too."

The corner of Sam's mouth twitched up in amusement. "It's almost like you want to think that's impossible."

"I don't _want_ to think it's impossible, it just _is_."

"Don't you ever wish things like Santa were real? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? Just to...balance the rest of it out, I guess."

"Even if those guys ever did exist, they'd be demon chow in a hot minute. We don't live in that kind of world."

"I'm not saying we do, I'm just saying...wouldn't it be nice if we did?"

"It'd be nice if there was world peace. It'd be nice if right now we weren't tracking down something turning kids into Swanson frozen dinners. It'd be nice if Scarlett Johansson was warm for my form and could magically be summoned whenever I did the little nose wrinkle from Bewitched. There are a lot of things that would be nice, Sammy, but we don't live in a nice world."

"You can't even _do_ the nose wrinkle from Bewitched."

"Exactly my point. Some things will just never be."

"But don't you ever just -"

"Just what?" Dean asked Sam, narrowing his eyes slightly. "What's this all about?"

Sam looked everywhere but Dean as he walked along the sidewalk, not wanting to voice the things he'd been thinking about since their father died in the hospital. It was all so complicated, how he felt, the grief and the relief, the love and the resentment. Even as he loved his father, now gone, he was angry at the way things had been his whole childhood and the fact that now nothing could ever change between them.

"Did you see that kid's room? Teddy bears and ponies and stickers on every surface. She had a drawing in her dresser drawer of the Easter Bunny. No Glock hidden under her pillow, no traps set up by the windows. Don't you ever feel like we missed out by never having a chance to believe in stuff like that? By never having that kind of childhood?"

"Hell no," said Dean, an expression on his face that showed that he found the idea ridiculous. "Why, so we could just have all that innocence crushed like a beer can as soon as we found out how it all _really_ worked? We were better off not being raised like these kids, because if we had been raised like these kids, we'd probably be dead right now. Dad prepared us for the way the world really was and it was - you know, it was good you didn't get into it until you were a little older, but lying to you about all that stuff, like Santa and the Tooth Fairy, that wouldn't have done anything for you."

"Maybe there's just a part of me that wishes it was real."

"Why's that? You hoping the Tooth Fairy will come and do more than leave money under your pillow?"

"Because if those things don't exist, the joy, and the innocence, and the wonder - then what are we even fighting for?"

Dean was quiet for a moment, thinking about that.

"We're fighting for people to be able to live their little lives without getting their faces eaten off by gribblies. And for them to be able to go about their day completely oblivious to the things knocking around in the dark. That's plenty," Dean said flippantly as they made their way up to a house with light blue siding and a maroon pickup in the driveway. "144 Blackwood Drive, this is it."

Sam went quiet as they made their way up to the Wilbersons' door.

They didn't get a chance to knock before the door opened. Mrs. Wilberson was standing there, her face wan, dark circles under her eyes.

"I saw you coming up the drive. Are you the FBI? You look like -"

Authority figures. Apparently, she wanted to see them because she wanted some answers.

They got out their fake IDs.

"That we are, ma'am" said Dean. "I'm Agent Theodore Kord. This is my partner Michael Carter. We wanted to ask you a few questions."

"We're hoping to fill in some gaps in our knowledge that we couldn't with the evidence collected by the local police," added Sam.

"Come in," Mrs. Wilberson said blankly, and she moved away from the door to let them in.

She didn't so much walk as float into the den, a wisp of a thing, her long, black hair tangles, her clothes hanging off her thing form as they were about to fall off at any moment because her body was going to dissolve in grief.

She sat on the very edge of the couch cushion and looked at the both of them, her expression filled with pain and with a strange timid longing, as if she was dying to tell them something but afraid of how it would sound.

"I hope you'll excuse my husband for not joining us. He's hardly been out of bed for days."

Sam had seen this before. Some couples supported each other in their grief, others fell apart. Right now, it seemed like the Wilbersons were at that stage where it was difficult to tell if the latter was happening or if they both just needed time alone to process and lick their wounds.

"I'm very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Wilberson. We'll try to keep this brief."

"I know what killed my daughter," she said before either of them could ask a single question. The two brothers shared a brief surprised glance before turning back to her. "My husband thinks I'm crazy, the police think I'm crazy, and you're probably going to think I'm crazy, too, but I saw it. I saw it in the window. Twice."

"Mrs. Wilberson, what did you see?"

"A figure. With long arms and legs. The first time it was just a shadow and I saw it smile as it slipped out the window. Its teeth were too bright. That was the night my baby -"

She closed her eyes tight and fat, glistening tears slid down her face, though she didn't make a sound.

"And the second time?"

"It was a few nights ago. I heard a hiss outside the window, looked into my daughter's room - and there he was. This time I saw him - it - better."

"What was there?"

"A teenage boy. With white hair, and - and a blue shirt. Maybe a sweatshirt? And he was pale like a corpse. He had the same long, skinny legs and arms, like a spider. He didn't look entirely human; there was something about his skin, about his proportions, that was just...off. And there was something vague about him, like he wasn't entirely there, like something was shifting in my head so I couldn't quite see him clearly. He saw me, though, and then he disappeared and by the time I got over to the window, I saw him disappearing into the treetops, like he flew there. And on the window, there was frost, just like the night my baby died."

"Mrs. Wilberson, have you ever seen something like this before, or any hint something was following your daughter around?"

"I did but I didn't see the signs. She told me there was something outside her window, whispering to her, and I thought it was just bad dreams."

Mrs. Wilberson was crumbling now, her expression agonized, her tears quietly plopping onto the fabric of her jeans.

"You couldn't have known, ma'am," said Sam comfortingly. "Not with something like this."

"But I should have. She told me that the kids at school all talked about playing with someone during the winter, a boy in blue, that brought the snow. A boy with a magic staff. The other kids were telling her he was real, that they played with him. I took her over for playdates with the Bennett kids around the block - and they have pictures. They have pictures of this thing on their refrigerator. And their kids aren't the only ones. I've seen pictures at the houses of the other kids when I took her over for playdates."

"What do you mean they have pictures?"

"The kids have all been drawing pictures of him. Kids that my daughter played with drew pictures of him before I ever saw him in the window. What I saw was exactly the same as in those pictures and the pictures are all exactly the same, from one to the next. Don't you see?" She leaned forward, looking desperate for them to believe her. "This _thing_ is real and it's been playing with them, toying with them. They trust him and he's going to use that trust to kill them all."

* * *

Sam and Dean walked briskly as they left the Wilberson house, back towards the Impala.

"We've got to get to the library and start going through some historical records."

Dean was quiet.

Sam was smug.

Finally, Dean said, "I'm still not saying he's real. There's something creepy the character is based on, but that whole pointy-shoed, folksy mother isn't the real deal."

Sam just grinned. "You sure you don't want to try the nose-twitch thing, see if Scarlett shows up?"

"Man, I wish."

* * *

"Face the facts, we are never going to find what we need in here."

"We still have more to go through."

"We're all the way back in the 1700s now and we've got some cases of people freezing to death, but no way of knowing if any of them could be our guy."

"Well, he's gotta be a teenager, right? We have some cases of kids, of adults - and they could just be exposure but those might even be his first victims. If we find one that's a teenager..." Sam's brows furrowed as he thumbed through another page in the musty book he was reading. "I think I found something."

"What?"

"This book talks about local lore and legends but it's a reprint of a book put out in 1750. So it's still got some of the historical accounts that the legends are thought to be based on. It says that the Jack Frost story started back in the early 1700s, among the children of Burgess. The author thinks it was based on the true story of a 'a boy of seventeen years drowning most tragically in a frozen pond.' They don't know who started the legend initially but think it may have been someone in his family, spreading a folk story that he was 'dancing on the winter wind.'"

"Where exactly does all the homicide come in? This thing's gotta have a reason it's doing all this, right?"

"Actually, this might be it," Sam said, tapping a passage on the page. "So, get this: it says his sister was with him when he drowned and talks about the tragic life lost that day on the ice. Maybe it has something to do with the sister?"

"That makes sense. The two of them take a dunk, they both die, he doesn't move on, his sister does, and he comes back a spirit. Maybe over time, he gets more and more resentful over the death of his sister, upset that she didn't get to live? Thinks the kids that are alive are undeserving, takes out his anger on them?"

"It's as good a theory as any. The only thing is if this thing is talking to the kids and, I don't know, grooming them to trust him to be his future victims, that's a lot more calculating than most spirits are."

"It's an old spirit, Sammy. Three hundred years being stuck between life and death? Stuck as a teenage boy but can't get laid? Who knows how twisted it's become. Maybe it's gone right through the blind rage some spirits have and come out the other side into something even crazier."

"Point."

"Looks like we got our man. Any chance we can find the body and torch it?"

"In a town like this that preserves its local history, there's got to be a historic graveyard somewhere where the earliest settlers were buried. We just have to find the grave of..." Sam turned the page back, read the name, and looked up at Dean. "...Jackson Overland."

* * *

They had to search three graveyards to find it and the last one was off the beaten track a bit, a good way into the woods around the town. The only reason they found it was because a clerk at the town archives had known it was there. The gravestones here were all crooked, some of them half-sunken into the ground. Others were crumbled or uprooted by tree roots jutting out of the ground. Weeds grew everywhere, obscuring most of them.

"Most of these are so worn down you can barely see the names," said Sam.

"We've searched two graveyards already and there aren't any other ones from this early. It's gotta be here."

"Unless he wasn't buried in a graveyard. Sometimes people back then were just buried somewhere random, with a wooden cross or marker. If that's the case, any markers would've long since rotted away."

"Wait, I think I found it."

Sam loped over to the grave Dean was pointing at and took a look at it.

**JACKSON OVERLAND**

**SON TO JOHN  
AND MARY OVERLAND**

**DIED ON  
JANUARY 26TH 1710  
IN Ye 17TH YEAR  
OF HIS AGE**

**GOOD SON,  
LOVING BROTHER,  
BRAVE SOUL**

It gave Sam pause. "Huh. His parents had the same names as mom and dad."

Dean gave a half-shrug, as if shrugging that fact over his shoulders and letting it cascade away. "I'll get the shovels."

Before long, they were jamming shovels into the packed earth and trying to make short work of digging up the grave. The sun would be down soon.

"I wonder what the 'brave soul' part of it means," Sam said after a while, using his foot to get the blade of the shovel in deep.

Dean perked up, looking up from digging, with a slight look of confusion on his face. "Does it matter?"

"I'm just wondering what it means."

"You've been wondering about a lot of stuff lately. Stop it. It's annoying."

"I don't know, something about this is weird to me."

"What's so weird about it? Standard dead guy with vengeance issues, taking it out on other people."

"Why does it need to be let in instead of just breaking the window or going through the walls? The protective marks are on the inner doors, not the windows."

"Standard _polite_ dead guy with vengeance issues, taking it out on other people."

"Dean, I'm serious."

"You're the one that was dead set on it being Little-Boy-Blue-From-Frostbite here."

"And I think that's what the story is based on, but I think we might be dealing with something...different."

"Even if it is, let's get its body up, salt, it, torch it, and see if that does the job. If not, we'll try curtain number two."

"Fine."

They dug and they dug and it was when they were about ten feet down and had dug out several feet sideways in both directions (In case the bones shifted under the earth) that they realized their efforts were futile.

"I don't think the body's here," Sam said, wiping sweat from his brow and smearing dirt to his forehead in the process.

"Do you think the bones broke down? His spirit could always be attached to something else."

"Ground's not really peaty here. Pretty neutral in acidity. Bones should've been preserved, even after this long."

"Our boy drowned, right? What if this an empty grave? What if they never recovered the body and just put up a headstone for the family?"

"That must be what happened. Either his body's at the bottom of whatever pond he drowned in or an animal dragged it out and carried it off somewhere."

"Great, so he could be anywhere. Even if we can find where he drowned, we'd have to dredge the whole freakin' pond," Dean grumbled.

"And that's even if his bones aren't in some random spot in the woods. If the body was dragged out by a bear or a wolf..."

Dean tossed his shovel up over the edge of the grave and heaved himself up to climb out.

"Curtain number two then," he grunted, as he dragged himself out. "Let's leave this open in case we have to pin him in it with silver or something."

"What exactly _is_ behind curtain number two?" asked Sam as he did the same.

"Find the spirit and toss stuff at it until we find something that works," Dean said matter-of-factly

"And how exactly are we supposed to find this thing?" Sam asked as they gathered up their shovels, the can of gas, and the salt, to put it back in the trunk of the Impala.

"We look for it."

"Look for it where?"

"I dunno, but I don't see you coming up with any bright ideas."

"Even if our plan is to toss whatever we can at it, we need more information to _find_ it."

"This thing strikes at night. If we sit on our heels, there might be another frigid first grader by morning."

"We have no idea where it's going to be and we can't cover the whole town. We should head back to the hotel. I can do more research online, especially since I know more things to look for after hitting the library."

"We're not spending the night with our thumbs up our asses while you fiddle around on your laptop."

"Okay, then what do you propose we do?"

"What did that lady say? That there was someone she had her kid have playdates with, right?"

"A family called the Bennetts."

"Small town like this, there can't be that many families with the same name. Why don't we crack open a phonebook, find 'em, and pay them a little visit?"

* * *

There were only two families named Bennett in the Burgess phone-book. The cover they'd come up with wouldn't work without knowing the names and some information about the kids, so a quick side trip to Burgess Elementary School and one brief break-in later, they'd made a phone call to the right family. With the cover they'd come up with, just showing up at the Bennett house definitely wouldn't fly, so Sam put on his best conciliatory, touchy-feeling tone of voice when making the call.

"We can be there in an hour. Would that work for you? I'm sorry I'm being so pushy about the timing, but with them renovating the office and having all of us make home visits to do this, my schedule's all over the place."

Sam bit his lip as he listened.

"I know, it's very unconventional, Mrs. Bennett, and even a little intrusive. We're really wondering why the district decided to do it this way ourselves, but they're the ones calling the shots. Anyway, we'll be there at eight o'clock. See you soon." Sam hung up the phone. "She bought it."

"Since when do school crisis counselors make home visits?"

"Does it matter? She bought it, even if she was a little skeptical."

"So what should we wear for this one. Do we have a sweater vest somewhere? This seems like a sweater vest kinda gig."

* * *

Sam had opted for the sweater vest and his hair parted in the middle. Dean went with a navy blue cardigan and fake glasses.

"Hi, Jamie, hi Sophie, my name is Oliver Queen and this is Dr. Carter Hall, the school sent us out to talk to some of the students and see how they're dealing with the scary things going on," said Sam gently.

Jamie Bennett was a brunette, twelve, small for his size, and had the most skeptical-looking expression on his face Sam had ever seen on another human being, let alone a twelve-year old. He was wearing loose-fitting jeans, a t-shirt that read "Keep Calm and Kill Zombies," and a blue flannel shirt that made him look like a holdover from the '90s. His six-year-old sister Sophie was pretty much his polar opposite, blond, chirpy and cheerful, and dressed like a unicorn had helped her pick out her clothes.

"Since when do school counselors make house-calls and do it this late at night?" Jamie asked, arms crossed as he sat at the kitchen table, his eyes flicking over to where his mother sat in the dining room, as if silently judging her parental judgement call.

She had checked their IDs (stolen during their elementary school break-in and then altered at the hotel) but even so, she wasn't entirely comfortable leaving her two kids alone with strangers, so she was occupying herself on her laptop in the dining room, within clear sight of her kids over the kitchen island.

"It's very unusual," Dean agreed, "but you know how school administrators can be."

"Principal Pretfield is usually pretty reasonable."

"Not with this," Dean said with a strained smile.

"And since when do they send two counselors at a time?" Jamie went on.

"Well, there's two of you," Sam pointed out. And they'd doubted their mother would let them be split up when she was already jumpy about it already.

"But you're talking to the both of us at the same time. You're not even splitting us up so it's one-on-one."

Sam was smiling the strained smile now. "Like we said, it's a little unusual, but we're just doing what we're told and trying to do our jobs. Now Jamie, Sophie, we're here to let you talk about your feelings. It's a scary and upsetting time right now -"

"I think the bogeyman did it," Sophie suddenly declared, as she made her bunny doll hop around on the table, her mouth pursed into a frown. "I think he's the one that hurt Marissa and the other kids."

"It wasn't the bogeyman," Jamie said with his eyeroll.

"Why not?" asked Sophie.

"Because that's not his M.O."

Sam's and Dean shared a brief glance and then Sam looked back to Jamie, tilting his head with interest.

"What do you mean by that? That it's not his M.O.?" he asked.

Jamie stared at them both suspiciously, looking, for just a moment, as if he'd been caught in a lie.

He recovered quickly. "Everyone knows he hides under beds and he gives people nightmares. He doesn't freeze them."

"Do you believe in the bogeyman?" Dean asked Jamie.

"No, that'd be stupid."

"But Jamie, we've seen Pi-" Sophie started and Jamie gave her a Look, which made her immediately go quiet and focus on making her doll hop around the table again.

"What were you going to say, Sophie?" asked Sam.

"Nothing," said Sophie in sing-song.

This was a little weird, Sam decided. He tried a new tactic.

"So you like zombies, huh?" he asked Jamie.

"Not really," said Jamie.

"Then why the shirt?" Sam asked.

"I just think everyone should take zombie preparedness seriously and make an action plan in case of a future zombie armageddon. I have a whole kit ready and I figure we could knock out the stairwell and live on the upper floor if we had to, but only if it was the slow Romero type zombie. Otherwise, I think we'd be out of luck since mom won't let us keep a gun in the house."

Dean and Sam shared a glance again. Dean looked moderately impressed that Jamie was thinking ahead.

"You believe in zombies?" asked Sam.

Jamie went quiet here, as if he was trying to figure out his answer. "It's a big world out there. I like to keep my mind open to the possibilities," he said slowly. "I just don't believe in the bogeyman."

There was something unsaid there, Sam could tell.

"So, do you believe in other things?" asked Dean. "Like ghosts, spirits?"

Now Jamie's eyes darted back and forth to each of them and his eyebrows furrowed slightly. Clearly the kid was picking up a vibe from them he didn't like.

"No."

"Yes, you do, Jamie," Sophie chirped up suddenly, "Mom says it's not nice to lie."

"_Soph_," Jamie said sharply and she went quiet again.

"It's just we noticed that picture up on the fridge. Looks pretty old, like it's been there a long time, but it's kind of interesting," said Sam, pointing. "That's you, isn't it? Riding a sled in the air?"

"That's like four years old. I drew it a long time ago."

"Who's that boy flying in the air? The one in blue, with the staff?"

"Nobody. One of my friends."

"Which is it? Nobody or one of your friends?" asked Dean.

"What does this have to do with what happened to the other kids at school?"

"We're just trying to get a sense of how you cope with things, Jamie," said Sam disarmingly. "Some people use art or their imagination."

"So that kid in blue, is that a classmate?" asked Dean. "An imaginary friend?"

"That's Ja -" Sophie started, but Jamie reacted quickly, putting a hand over her mouth and whispering something in her ear, too quiet for Dean and Sam to hear.

"Jamie says I feel like going to play in my room now," she said, getting up from the chair and skipping off.

"Why did you do that, Jamie?" asked Sam. "What was she about to say?"

Jamie leaned in close.

"You're not from the school," he said. "And if you don't leave right now, I'm going to scream and call in my mom and get her to call the cops."

"Of course we're from the school," said Sam.

"I know our crisis counselor because I've gotten sent down a bunch of times for freaking out my teachers for being weird. Our crisis counselor is Mrs. Leakey and she's always complaining about having to work by herself."

"We're very new, just recently hired -" Dean started.

"- and Oliver Queen is the Green Arrow from DC Comics and Carter Hall is Hawkman. The only way you could have been more obvious fakes is if you said your names were Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne. You're not from the school. Get out of my house _right now_."

Sam leaned in, speaking earnestly, "Jamie, listen, we just -"

"Mooom!" Jamie yelled.

"- right, okay, leaving," Sam said as he and Dean got out of their chairs.

"Jamie, what's wrong?" asked his mother, getting up from the dining room table.

"We're going to be heading out now, ma'am," said Sam politely and he and Dean motored for the door.

They didn't start running until they reached the end of the driveway, and by that time, Jamie's mother had talked to Jamie and was yelling out the front door.

"Hey! Hey, if you're not from the school, who are you? I'm calling the police!"

"Well, that went well," said Dean as the two of them hauled ass back to the Impala and jumped in.

He started the engine and floored it, turning out of the neighborhood and trying to put some distance between them and the Bennett house before the cops came.

"Both those kids knew something," said Dean. "The little girl even started to say his name."

"Jamie seemed like he didn't want to hear a word against him. He was definitely protecting him. Do you think he's messing with the kids' heads?"

"Pulling a little Pied Piper thing? Definitely possible."

"What should we do now?"

Dean shook his head. "You're right about us not knowing where to head next. So, let's head back to the hotel, see if you can find more, doing some research. We just have to hope this thing doesn't strike again tonight."

* * *

**_"Let me in." _**

Sally Whitman sat in her bed, staring at the figure at the window.

**_"Let me in and we can play."_**

"Are you Jack Frost? I heard from Pippa that Jack Frost can fly and he made Jamie Bennett fly to her window and he made it snow in her room and Cupcake's room and Jamie's room and Claude and Caleb's room and Monty's room -"

**_"Let me in."_**

"- but I stopped believing in you the other day and I'm not sure why but now that you're real and you're here, can you make it snow in my room? I want it to snow in my room. Can you do that pretty please?"

**_"Let me in and we'll play." _**

"Okay, but I want to see snow. In my room."

Sally got out of bed and slipped on her pony slippers, walking over to the window.

Right as she got over to it, there was a smashing sound and the glass cracked as if the figure outside had been slammed into it, hard. Sally jumped back and scurried back to her bed, scared. She turned on her bedside lamp to see the window better.

There was another loud smack and this time she saw a teenage boy slammed into the glass, headfirst. Blood spattered across the cracked window pane.

Sally screamed at the sight of the blood.

There was a moment that his face was pressed against the glass, as if something was holding him there. His expression was pained. With a cry of rage that made the glass reverberate, he managed to twist away, there was a bright flash of blue light, and thick ice suddenly blocked the cracked window.

"Daaaaddy!" Sally screamed.

Reggie Whitman burst through his daughter's door.

"Sally, what is it? What's wrong - oh my god," he said, the moment he saw the cracked, bloody, iced-over window.

"Daaaaddy!" his daughter wailed and he grabbed her up in his arms and raced out of the room.

Outside the window, someone screamed in frustration, then a hand touched the ice, wiping the condensation from it. A face peered in to see if the girl had left the room, blue eyes glittering in the scant light, and then gritting his teeth in frustration, the boy flew off into the night.

His quarry had eluded him tonight.

That wasn't going to happen again.


	2. Chapter 2

**A Colder Shade of Pale**

**by Saphie**

* * *

**Chapter Two**

Research turned out fruitless, and after news of the attack from the night before - and that it had a survivor - the two of them made a house call, but that hadn't turned up many new details, beyond a physical description of the intruder outside that matched all the other descriptions.

They still weren't any closer to figuring out what exactly its game was and how it was picking out its victims.

"Think we should call Bobby on this one?" asked Sam as he and Dean walked out of the diner they'd had lunch out, taking in the air to clear their heads and think. "Maybe he's got an idea what we should do next."

"I dunno."

They passed a playground and noticed a few little girls jumping rope and singing a little song to the beat of the jump-rope against the asphalt.

"There's something we're missing here," Sam went on. "Something we're..." Sam paused. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Those girls, playing jump-rope. Listen to what they're singiing."

They sang:

_Jack Frost is a snow spirit._  
_If he comes to play with you_  
_You'll both have a lot of fun_  
_And he'll make snow days for you._

_If you're a kid and you've been good,_  
_Jack will only tease you,_  
_But if you're a kid who won't believe_  
_Jack will come and freeze you. _

Dean looked at Sam and nodded his head towards the girls. Taking a moment to think up a good cover story, Sam walked into the playground.

"Hey girls, can I talk to you a minute?" Sam said.

They stopped jumping rope, but like any children taught the dangers of talking to strangers, they regarded him with a great deal of caution and kept their distance.

"My friend and I are students from the community college nearby. We're studying folklore - about stories like the story of Jack Frost - and how those stories change over time. We heard your rhyme as we were walking by and were just wondering if you knew how it came to be about Jack freezing people since that's a new part of the story. We have to do a homework project on how a specific story can change and we were thinking of using Jack Frost's story."

The girls seemed to find this a non-creepy reason for Sam to talk to them, so one of them said, "Everyone at school was talking about it and I'm not sure who started it, but the freezing thing is because we figured out what all the kids that died had in common so that Jack got mad at them."

"What reason is that?" asked Sam.

"They stopped believing in him and Santa and the Tooth Fairy and stuff like that, so we think he got mad. So if you're good and you believe, he'll just play, but if you're bad like they were and you stop, he'll freeze you. I don't know who made the rhyme but everyone knows that's why it changed that way. So now everyone is being really careful if they talk about that stuff, like I heard Pippa Gladfield doesn't believe anymore and everyone thinks he's going to freeze her next."

"Really. Well, thanks, that's interesting stuff. It's something that can definitely help with our project."

Sam turned around and almost ran into Sophie Bennett, who was staring up at him with a very intense gaze, and holding a Barbie with tangled hair in her hand.

"They're lying, Jack doesn't freeze people. Jamie and I keep telling everyone that but only a few of them will listen."

"Because you know Jack Frost, right?" Sam prompted, trying to coax information out of her.

Sophie nodded.

"Jack is our friend. Jamie's his favorite, though."

"Do you happen to know where Jack spends his time? We'd like to talk to him, clear this whole thing up."

Sophie was quiet for a moment, looking down at her toes. Then she finally relented.

"Only if you're just going to talk to him and not be mean."

"Do we look like mean guys to you?" Dean asked.

"Yes," said Sophie honestly.

Dean frowned. "Look, kid, I promise we'll be really nice. Scout's honor," Dean promised.

"Okay, as long as you're not mean. Jack usually hangs out around the -"

"Sophie, what are you doing?!"

Jamie, who had been hanging out near the edge of the playground with his friends, finally noticed who his sister was talking to and had come running over, looking panicked - and guilty that he hadn't noticed his sister talking to strangers right away.

He got between his sister and the Winchesters, looking like he was ready to tear their heads off if they made a wrong move, despite his size. Sam had seen those expressions and body language on more than one occasion.

"I was just -"

"We don't know who they are. They lied about it when they came to our house."

"But -"

"No, buts, Sophie, and you shouldn't talk to strangers, anyway." Jamie took his sister by the hand and started leading her away. "And you two, stay away from my sister!"

"Jamie, listen -" Sam started but Jamie was rushing her away now, going as fast as he could with her still keeping up.

"We can't let him get away without giving us some answers," said Dean.

Sam nodded and the two of them ran after them. Jamie turned down a narrow street with a few out-of-business shops, trying to drag his sister home. When she wasn't keep up, he swept the six-year-old up into his arms to carry her.

"Jamie, hold up," Sam called out as they caught up. "I know you don't know us but we're trying to help. We need to know about Jack Frost and we know you've had contact with him."

"I have no idea who you are. If I tell you anything, he might wind up getting dissected by the government or something. Go away! Jack had nothing to do with those kids dying!"

"Jamie," Sam said, as he caught up, reaching out to gently grab Jamie's arm to slow him down - and that was when a foot connected with his side almost hard enough to break his ribs, sending him sprawling.

"The hell -" said Dean, and that was when he felt something hard connect with the back of his head, also sending him sprawling.

Sam looked up to see a blurry shape in the air. The more he tried to focus on it, the more clear and substantial it become.

"Dean, do you see that?"

"I see it, Sammy."

The boy looked down at them with an expression of pure malice, hands gripped tightly on his staff. The wind was whipping at his blue hoodie and his mussy white hair, and his eyes glittered with rage.

Jamie and his sister had made a run for it, rushing along so quickly the little girl had dropped her doll. No one else was on the street, so the Winchesters got out their guns.

The boy's eyes went wide, as if he was surprised at even being seen and he suddenly went more visible, more tangible, as if he wasn't even trying to hide anymore. He waved his staff before they could fire and blue light leapt out and hit their guns. Suddenly, the metal was so cold it burned and they both yelped and dropped them instinctually.

The spirit surged forward in the air, kicking Dean in the gut so that he went down wheezing, and used the crook of his staff to hook at Sam's ankle to sweep him off his feet. With two sharp flicks of his staff, he knocked their guns out of their hands, sending them skittering across the asphalt.

He spoke to them, his voice low and menacing, "Stay away from the kids. I'd say 'or else' but then I'd have to answer 'or else what?' and I'm not really a fan of talking about imagery gory enough to make myself throw up."

His rage temporarily subsided long enough for him to reach down to pick up Sophie's dropped Barbie, but the moment he did, cold wind suddenly exploded around them and before they could react, he shot up into the air and disappeared.

"Yeah, so I'd say he's hostile," said Sam.

"Definitely hostile," groaned Dean, still clutching at his stomach where he was curled on the ground.

* * *

"So what have we got?" said Sam, pouring over his notes and books. After the spirit had attacked them, they'd headed back to the hotel, bandaged up their hands and got to work.

"Well, he's protective of his prey. Not sure why he didn't just kill us, though. What's worse is the kids seem to want to defend him, so he's probably Jedi-ing them pretty hard. And he packs a punch, what with giving us a bad case of freezer burn."

"Did you notice the staff? He seemed to use it to channel his power. Possibly some kind of totem, or the object he's attached to."

"Yeah, but since when have spirits attached to an object carried the thing around _themselves_?"

"Obviously he's pretty powerful."

"Class Seven metaspectre. There is only Zuul," Dean joked. "Seriously, though, we need to step it up. This guy seems like he's in a different league."

"Those girls said the kids he targeted had stopped believing in him before they were killed. They thought that's why he targeted them. We think Jack's sister is tangled up in this, right? What if he's fixated on their belief because of her?"

"What d'you mean?"

"Think about it, his sister died when she was young, innocent. Maybe when they grow up, when they stop believing in him, stop being kids - when they move past what his sister was when she died - he kills them."

"Keeps them young forever."

"Bingo. So he either senses it or finds out from kids that he talks to - like Jamie - who's stopped believing, pokes around at their windows until they believe in him again, enough to let him in, then freezes them to death to make it so they never grow up."

"So if we can figure out what kids he's dealt with that have stopped believing, we might know who he's targeting next."

"Those girls mentioned a girl that they thought he was going after. Pippa Gladfield. If they were talking about her, if it was that widely known, the spirit probably knows."

"Let's find out where Pippi Longstocking lives, stake out her house, and salt and torch this sucker if he shows up. We can try to torch the staff, too, if that's what he's connected to. If he's more of a zombie, his grave's still open and we have some silver stakes."

"It's as good a plan as any."

* * *

The hardest part of doing a stake out was hiding where they could see anything trying to come into the girl's window without being seen themselves. They managed to successfully hide with their guns and their knapsacks (full of a box of salt, silver stakes, and a can of gasoline) in the next door neighbor's rhododendrons.

Then they waited. And they waited. And for good measure, they waited some more.

_The glamorous life of a hunte_r, thought Dean, as he shoved some leaves out of his face.

"Where is this thing? This is around the time the other kids got attacked."

"I don't know," said Sam. "Maybe we were wrong. Maybe she isn't its next target."

"Wait. Sam, look."

"What? I don't see anything."

"Look at the side of the house, under the window."

The moonlight was beaming down from the sky above casting the tree outside the girls' window in shadow. As the breeze gently tousled the branches and they swayed back and forth, the shadows cast in the moonlight shifted over the side of the house.

Or at least part of the shadows shifted. A part of them stayed still, an outline that was vaguely human in shape.

"It's there," said Sam, as he and Dean climbed out from their hiding place in the bushes. "It's there at her window. Invisible, but casting a shadow."

They saw the window suddenly shatter and ran around to the kitchen door, kicked it open, and raced into the house, running up the stairs. Noises of alarm came from the bedroom, sounding like the girl's parents reacting to the noise of the door being kicked in, but Sam and Dean ignored it.

They were a little too occupied by the screams that came from the girl's room. The sounds of a struggle could be heard inside, something clattering, glass and ceramic shattering, and a crisp noise that sounded like settling snow. Kicking open the door, they found that the room was wrecked. A field hockey stick lay discarded next to a broken globe. The window was broken and a desk lamp was smashed on the floor; ice clung to the walls in strange streaks as if they'd been whipped out by something in a sweeping line.

On the bed was the girl, her skin so pale it was nearly blue, her eyes still open wide. Bent over her, in the process of pulling her up into his arms, was the spirit that had attacked them in the alley. He looked worse for wear, a gash on his cheek open and bleeding.

Apparently, Pippi had fought back - and it seemed to have saved her life. Her chest was rising and falling slowly but she was still visibly breathing.

Dean raised his shotgun, but the extra moment he took to aim to avoid hitting the girl gave the spirit time to react. Pointing his staff at Dean, he froze the gun to Dean's hands, so that he couldn't pull the trigger.

"Augh! Sonovabitch!"

Fortunately, the effort made Frost put the girl back down on the bed. Dean moved out of the way so Sam could sweep in with his shotgun, banging his iced up hands against the dresser to try to get the ice off of it.

"Sam, shoot him!"

Sam aimed and fired a blast of rock salt, but Frost jumped up and bounced off the ceiling so that Sam's shot missed, blasting into the wall instead, and he kicked the gun up so hard it slammed into Sam's face, splitting his lip.

"Goddamit, Sam, stop messing around and take Tigger out!" Dean said, still chipping away at the ice.

"I'm trying!"

"Why do you have guns in a little girl's room?!" the spirit yelled, his voice sounding strangely panicked. "What are you even doing here? I told you to stay away from the kids!"

A terrible wind suddenly blew through the bedroom door from the rest of the girl's house into her room, so strong that he and Sam actually lifted off the ground, dragged inexorably towards the window. Somehow, the girl was completely untouched where she lay on the bed.

They were sucked through and after Dean's shoulder slammed painfully into the window frame, he felt himself falling. Dread filled his gut at the thought of the pain he knew was coming with impact but instead of hitting the ground, he suddenly found himself crashing into a drift of powdery snow that hadn't been there when he and Sam were outside.

Sitting up and looking around, head darting back and forth like a meerkat, Dean looked over at his brother, who was also sitting up in the snow, his face covered in it. Screaming rang out from the window above, as the girl's parents found her. Dean could only hope they could get her treated for hypothermia in time.

The spirit was nowhere in sight.

Sam tried to climb out of the snow, blowing snow from his lips. Shaking his hands and finding them and the guns still frozen, Dean turned to his brother and shrugged slightly.

"That went well."

* * *

"Paper says she survived it and she's stable at the local hospital," said Sam as his fingers tippy-tapped away of the keys of his laptop.

"That's good at least. So, what now?"

They'd managed to get away before they were seen and had gone back to the hotel for the night. In the light of morning, they were trying to put all the pieces together.

"Alright, so the last two victims he attacked survived. We had the one who had a near-miss, Sally Whitman. This one, Pippa Gladfield, fought back against him and it may have saved her life. Probably got to see and talk to him up close and personal. The kids think it has to do with them losing belief and that's definitely possible. The Miller kid had those drawings of the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, but they were crumpled and stuffed away in a drawer, Pippa supposedly stopped believing..."

"Then we have Jamie and his sister, who probably know everything we need to know about this clown, but we're never going to be able to get answers out of Sophie with her mom and brother worried about stranger danger, and Jamie's been mind-whammied into being Jackie boy's very own personal Patty Hearst."

"Pippa might know something, might have heard him say something," Sam conjectured. "Something that'd give us more to go on, to figure out where he hides or his next target."

"She's probably not going to know anything more than Sally Whitman."

"It's still better than nothing. Her room had protective symbols over the door, too, and she's older than the other kids; maybe she knows who put them there and why."

"And maybe we'll luck out and run into some naughty nurses while we're at it," Dean said with a waggle of his eyebrows.

"Dean, you're confusing real life for porn again."

* * *

They had to wait until visiting hours were over, to be sure that the girl's parents were out of the room. Fortunately, visiting hours ended at eight o'clock in the pediatric ward and Pippa was stable enough for her parents to be willing to leave her for the night, which meant they had at least a few hours before the spirit struck again. After sneaking in under the pretense of delivering flowers during the daytime and absconding with some badges to alter, they showed up in scrubs and white coats and made their way to the pediatric ward, trying to look as if they belonged there.

Fortunately, it was a fairly busy hospital and a bit of a flu epidemic was going on in the area, which meant the staff was too occupied with their own work to worry if other people were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

After visiting hours were over and the two were sure Pippa's parents had left for the night, they tapped at her door with her medical chart in Sam's hands (casually taken from the shelf near the nurse' station).

"Hi there, I'm Dr. Stevens and this is Dr. Grey. We're here to talk to you about your recovery, Pippa," said Sam.

"Um. Okay."

The twelve-year-old looked much better than when they'd last seen her, the color having returned to her cheeks. There were a few patches where her skin looked raw, where it had been burned by cold, but it was only covered in what looked like ointment rather than bandages and none of the damage looked that severe. She was wearing beanie hat on her head that looked more to be on for comfort and familiarity rather than because it was cold.

"Now Pippa, uh, we were wondering if you remembered anything about what happened? The nature of your injuries is a little bewildering and it'd help us with treatment if we knew how you got them," Sam lied.

"I already talked to the police about it."

"They don't really share information with us," said Dean.

"I also talked to Dr. Payne about it."

Dean snorted and Sam shot him a look.

"What?" Dean protested. "Come on, it's ironic."

"I told everyone, I don't remember how it happened."

"You don't remember anything? Anything at all?" asked Sam.

Pippa stared at them both, then cocked her head just slightly as she looked at them. Then her eyes went wide and her hand moved towards the call button of her bed.

Dean, realizing what was happening, tugged it out of her reach.

"Pippa, we're not here to hurt you," Sam said gently.

She took in a deep breath and opened her mouth to scream.

"We're trying to find the thing that did this to you so we can stop it," Dean said quickly, even though Sam and him were getting ready to bolt if they had to.

Pippa sat there for a moment, mouth open, then swallowed thickly, looking as if she was trying to figure out what to do next. Finally, she seemed to settle down, though she stared at them both cautiously.

"How did you know?" Sam asked, wondering how she'd seen past their cover.

"Jamie texted me and told me there were two weird guys that came to his house pretending to be the school crisis counselors. A tall moosey guy and guy that talked like a James Dean wannabe.

"Tall moosey guy -"

"Wannabe -"

"He said you were dumb enough to use fake names that were from comics. And you...don't seem like doctors. Especially you," she said of Dean.

"Well, I - you know, most kids aren't into comics anymore," Dean protested, scratching the back of his head.

"We're trying to get information to stop the thing killing the kids, that's all," Sam said gently. "Unfortunately, that means finding ways to talk to people we might not talk to otherwise, hence the disguises and cover stories. Most people would think we were crazy if we told them about the things we know exist out there."

Something about the idea of knowing about things no one else would understand seemed to hit a note with Pippa.

"Why are you trying to stop it?" she asked.

"Because that's what we do," said Dean. "We go around taking crap like that down. All the monsters, the nightmares, the oogity boogity things that go bump in the night. Someone's gotta do it."

"So...you fight the things me and my friends have to face sometimes then."

"What things do you have to face, Pippa?" asked Sam.

"Nightmares. Not just the ones you have at night. Monsters. We've wound up in situations involving them since we were younger. The first time happened just because we were there, but the thing responsible for it...he has kind of a grudge now. A lot of stuff comes our way whether we like it or not."

"Is that why you had the protective symbols over your door? Do you know where they came from?" Sam went on.

"That was Jamie's idea."

"How did Jamie know about them?" Dean asked.

Pippa's forehead wrinkled in thought. "I can't tell you that. That's his private business."

Sam's mouth pursed in thought. "We saw those symbols in the other victims' houses, Pippa. Was Jamie behind that, too?"

"I don't know. I only know he did the ones for us."

"Do you remember what happened the other night?" Dean asked.

"I - everything from the last week is really fuzzy, but I stopped believing. I stopped believing in Jack and Santa and the Tooth Fairy and everyone. I still don't know why. And I started hearing a voice whispering at my window, telling me to let it in to come play. I knew my parents wouldn't believe me, and the more it did it, the more I wanted to open the window even thought I was scared, like my brain was having a harder and harder time coming up with reasons I shouldn't. But I wasn't giving in fast enough and it got mad and broke through the window to get in, so I tried to hit it with my field hockey stick. Then it got cold and everything went dark and I woke up in the hospital."

"Did you get a good look at it?" asked Sam.

"No. It was just a shadow of a person. Like of a boy. All I could really see was his smile sometimes, which was too shiny."

"What did he say to you?" asked Sam.

"He just kept wanting to be let in, telling me he wanted to play. It was really weird, because even though it was about ten times creepier, he almost talked like Ja -"

Pippa stopped, clamping her mouth shut.

"Like Jack Frost?" prompted Dean.

Pippa kept her lips pressed in a thin line. Finally, she said, "He didn't do this."

"We saw him leaning over you when we busted in to help," said Dean.

"It wasn't him," Pippa insisted. "I know what Jack looks like and I know what he sounds like."

"Things like him, spirits, monsters, sometimes they can change form, sometimes they pretend to be something other than what they are -" started Sam, but she interrupted him.

"Jack wouldn't hurt kids."

"Pippa, we think he might be -" said Sam, but she interrupted him again,

"Get out or I'll scream."

"Okay, okay, we're leaving," Sam said, holding up his hands placatingly, and he and Dean got up and left the room. "Thank you for answering our questions."

"Man, that spook's got them mind-whammied hard," said Dean quietly to Sam as they made their way up the hallway, looking back to see if Pippa had stirred up enough of a fuss to get them followed. So far, they seemed to be in the clear.

"I don't get it. How did Jamie know about the yan?"

"Who the hell knows? It's impossible to get a read on that kid."

"I am so sorry I'm late, Beth. I know you need to get report and get out of here."

The voice was familiar and Sam and Dean looked over to see Jamie's mother at the nurses' station, wearing purple scrubs. Sam and Dean's eyes went wide and they quickly ducked into a supply alcove with racks of bed linens, where they were hidden from view but could still hear the conversation.

"Is everything okay? Linda was telling me you had some strange men trying to come in - "

"It was terrifying, I don't know how I could've made a mistake like that, letting them in the house with the kids. But they had IDs from the school and everything. Who would put that much effort into something like that? The police have no idea who they even are, and Sophie's so shaken. She's been upset all day, and now she's on this weird kick where she doesn't believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny or any of that anymore and I have no idea why. I don't even know where it came from. I think between those men and the deaths around town she's been shaken by it. I'm seriously considering taking her to a counselor of it keeps up."

"We gotta get back to the Bennett house," said Dean quietly and Sam nodded. The two of them snuck out and made their way out of the hospital, breaking into a run to get back to the Impala as soon as they were sure they wouldn't be seen running.

If Sophie no longer believed, and Jamie was being mind-whammed by Jack, it meant she was probably the next target.

* * *

The Impala screeched to a stop up the road from the Bennett house and Sam and Dean got out and popped the trunk. Pulling out their guns and their gear, they set about making a plan.

"How are we doing this, Sammy? Last time, waiting outside and barging in wasn't such a good idea."

"Well, Mrs. Bennett's working at the hospital, right? Chances are, with Jamie being twelve and a responsible kid, they might be home alone. We could probably get away with breaking in and hiding in the house until he shows."

Dean closed the trunks. "Sounds good to m - shit! He's here early!"

He immediately started running and Sam instinctually followed. Down the street, Jack Frost was flying toward the Bennett house, hopping from tree to tree, roof to roof, looking around carefully as if trying to avoid being seen. For some reason, he wasn't invisible like he'd been at Pippa's window. As Sam and Dean got close to the house, he opened up the long window that led to one of the bedrooms and stepped inside.

Dean kicked in the back door and he and Sam barrelled through the house, racing up the stairs. Two rooms were empty, one in soft blues that was clearly Jamie's mother's room, and the other all in pink and clearly Sophie's.

The last bedroom was Jamie's and they came in through the door to a sight they certainly hadn't expected. The room was perfectly normal, full of science posters and toy robots and a constellation map on the wall. Sophie and Jamie were camped out on the floor among cushions and pillows and toys, a little blanket fort over their heads as if they were having some chill time before bed.

What was so unusual was that there was a thick line of salt that was around the two of them in a solid circle. The canister was still next to Jamie and so was a baseball bat. In a second circle outside the salt barrier, anise seeds and leaves were spread in a circle as well.

"What are you doing in my house?" Jamie yelled, standing up and picking up the baseball bat as soon as they barged in.

"Kid, calm down," Dean said and he and Sam lowered their guns, "we're here to help you. Where is he? Where's Frost?"

He wasn't in the room anywhere.

There was only one place he could be if he hadn't left.

Dean turned to look up in the corner over the door and he only caught the briefest glimpse of the spirit perched there, defying gravity like some jumping spider waiting to spring, before the wooden staff caught him in the face and sent him falling backward into Jamie's dresser. Jack then rounded on Sam, using the staff to lean on as he whipped out a sharp kick to his solar plexus, but Sam managed to grab his foot and use his momentum to throw him to the floor. Frost skidded into the line of salt and anise seeds, disrupting it - and oddly, the salt did nothing to bar his progress. Pointing his staff at the floor under Sam's feet, he froze that patch of floor into a smooth plane of ice that made Sam slip and fall onto his back.

Dean climbed to his feet at the same time Jack turned to Jamie and his sister.

At exactly the same time, Jack and Dean shouted, "Jamie, take your sister and get out of here!"

It gave them both a moment of pause, where Dean and the spirit turned to stare each other in the eye, but Jamie didn't hesitate, holding the bat with one hand and pulling Sophie up into his arms with the other arm. He ran out with his sister and there was a strange vorp noise in the hall and a burst of light, but Dean didn't have the chance to see what had happened out there before Jack turned and aimed his staff at him.

"I told you to leave the kids in this town alone!" Jack cried out. He blasted ice in Dean's direction, but Dean dodged out of the way, firing a round of salt at the spirit as he went. Jack, in turn, flew up into the air just as Dean was lining up the shot so that it missed. Landing in the corner of the room and running along the wall, he swiped a blast of ice at Sam, making him dodge behind Jamie's bed, and brought his staff around for another swing at Dean's head.

The fight was furious and ruthless - and carried on much longer than Dean would have liked. Frost was fast, vicious, and they couldn't get him to sit still long enough to hit him.

"I don't know what your deal is, but seeing as this is the second kid's room I've caught you in with guns, enough is enough!"

"You've got a lot of nerve talking about being in kids' rooms, pal, after killing three of them in their beds," Dean snarled, firing at the spirit. His reflexes were too fast, and instead of being hit, a desk lamp exploded behind him as he dodged.

The spirit glared. "I didn't kill those kids." Then he looked confused where he perched in the corner of the ceiling. He didn't attack as they both reloaded. "That's why you're here, isn't it. You think I killed them."

"We saw you in Pippa's room."

"I was trying to take her to the hospital. I chased it aw -"

Dean cut him off by firing another round that Jack dodged and then Jack was in up close and personal, knocking his shotgun out of his hands with his staff and kicking Sam's out of his, too. It was down to hand to hand after that. The kid was untrained but his reflexes and the way he understood space made him a handful. It also didn't hurt that he seemed hard to damage. He didn't have supernatural strength but when Dean punched him in the face, it hardly seemed to register beyond the initial recoil of Jack's head.

"You've got this all wrong. If you're here to protect the kids, we're here for the same thing," said Jack as he punched Sam in the nose. "We're not enemies!"

"You have a funny way of showing it!" Sam said, stumbling back holding his bloody nose.

"You have guns, what am I supposed to do, stand still?"

"Cut the crap, kid!" shouted Dean, getting a good swing in and knocking Jack back with a punch to the chin. He picked up a desk lamp and slammed it in the spirit's head. "You're a monster and your icy little murder spree ends now."

Frost knocked the desk lamp out of Dean's hand with his staff, then turned it towards him and blasted an icy torrent at the hunter, knocking him back against the dresser and freezing him there, with his arms pinned by ice and only his head free of the mass of ice spread over his chest.

Then he lunged towards Sam, jumping on his back and using his staff to choke him.

Sam thrashed, trying to slam him into the wall.

"You have to - oof - listen to me!" Jack said. "I'm a Guardian! I'm a spirit that - ow! - guards kids! I'm trying to hunt the same thing down as you!"

Sam staggered to his knees, choking, his face red.

Pulling as hard as he could, Dean managed to crack the ice and get an arm free. Reaching out as far as he could, he tried to reach for his fallen gun.

"Sammy!"

Fingers brushing against the stock, Dean gritted his teeth as he stretched his arm out as far as it'd possibly go.

"I'm sorry," the spirit was saying to Sam. "I'm not going to kill you. Just gooo to sleep. Take it easy, big guy."

Dean finally managed to snag the gun and slid it closer, lifting it up and aiming. Sam was in the way and his struggling made it too difficult to get a clear shot. The spirit's staff, though was jutting out away from the both of them.

Dean took careful aim, hoping against hope that he could make the shot, and fired.

The spirit screamed as the top of the staff was snapped off by the shot, and let go of Sam, falling back and caving in on himself, clutching at his chest.

"Sammy, the staff! Break the staff!"

Coughing and wheezing, Sam reached out for the part that had snapped off and snapped it again, into another two pieces. Now the spirit curled on the floor, gasping in agonized breaths.

Using the butt of the shotgun, Dean smashed himself free, climbing to his feet.

In a last ditch attempt to prevent them from breaking the staff further, Frost grabbed the two pieces in Sam's hands and pulled them free, kicking him in the stomach to make him let go. Gathering all the pieces, he rushed over to the window and tossed them outside.

It was the last thing he did before he took a shotgun blast of salt to the back. Crying out and falling to his knees at the window, the spirit turned around to face them, and took another shot to the chest from Sam, who now had his gun in his hands again.

"Pin him down!"

Both Winchesters grabbed him by a foot and dragged him back into the center of the room where the salt was already spread in a circle. He struggled with them, fighting and kicking and thrashing, but they each took out a silver spike and plunged one into each hand, pinning him to the bedroom floor.

Jack screamed when his hands were pierced and it wasn't inhuman, it wasn't feral and strange and otherworldly like it was for many of the things they fought. It sounded human and scared - and above all else, young - and Sam visibly flinched when he heard it.

"Get the salt and the gasoline," said Dean.

"We're doing it here?"

"We let him up and he might get away again. If we burn the house down, we burn it down. No one's here. Then we'll burn the staff outside just to make sure all our bases are covered."

"Burn it -?" Jack gasped. "You're going to -?"

His eyes went wide as he saw them bringing over the container of salt and the can of gasoline.

Wincing as more salt was poured into his wounds by Sam, he eyed the can of gas with increasing horror as Dean carried it over.

"No, no, no listen, listen to me, you've got the wrong spirit here! What did this, it's called a fearling; it feeds on the belief of kids and - AUUUUUGH!"

Apparently the gasoline burned when it hit his wounds. Who'da'thunk? Dean couldn't help a vindictive little twitch of satisfaction from tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"You know, considering you're Mr. Ten Below, setting you on fire's poetic justice, right? For you, that's probably a bit like freezing to death, just like what you did to those kids."

"I didn't - I didn't do it," Jack gasped, nearly sobbing now. "I'm a Guardian. The Man in the Moon chose me as a Guardian and we protect kids, we protect them from the things that try to hurt them -"

"Who's we?" asked Sam.

"Me, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and the Easter Bunny."

Dean raised his eyebrows and shook his head as he pulled out a book of matches. "Right, and I bet Baby New Year throws some bitchin' parties."

"Actually -" Jack saw the matches and broke off that line of thought. "Please just gimme a minute to explain or - or just talk to Jamie. We were setting a trap for the fearling, he'll tell you, we were - oh no. Nonono!"

"Yeah yeah," said Dean, breaking off a match. It was right then that he felt something hard connect with the back of his skull, making him drop the match and fall forward to his knees.

"Let him go!" a ferocious voice screamed and he turned to see Jamie standing behind them, holding his baseball bat.

Sam leapt forward and wrestled it from his hands, grabbing him and pulling him into a half-nelson.

"That kid's _really_ starting to piss me off," said Dean, climbing to his feet, holding the back of his head.

"Jamie, we're trying to help you," Sam said gently, holding him tight. "This thing is messing with your head. He killed those other kids."

"No, he's not! A fearling's doing it. It targeted Sophie and we were going to trap it and kill it! Let him go! Let my brother go!"

At being called brother, the spirit's eyes went wide and his expression suddenly looked just as touched as it looked scared.

"This thing's not your brother, kid," said Dean, getting out another match.

"He may as well be! Let him go!" Jamie was crying now and still fighting Sam ferociously. "Please let him go."

Dean lit the match. The spirit look up at him and now he was crying, terrified tears pouring down his face. He started begging, but strangely, it wasn't his life he was begging for.

"Please don't make him watch. You can kill me, you can do whatever you want to me, but please don't make him watch," Jack sobbed.

Dean froze in place, looking down at the spirit's face. Instantly, he was brought back to that day, so many years ago, that he and Sam had almost bought it. The look on Jamie's face might as well have been a mirror to how Sam's had been, and the look on Jack's was one of pure brotherly love. The desire to see Jamie happy and safe and with his innocence still intact was etched into his pale skin, threaded under it and through it, through all of him, and Dean could see it plain as day.

He knew that feeling well enough to see it in someone else. It was something he felt just about every day of his life.

For an interminable moment, Dean stood there, holding the lit match, and then he spotted Sophie's Barbie doll on the floor, the one Jack had picked up from the alley when she dropped it.

Apparently, he'd returned it to her.

He heard Sam's voice behind him.

"Dean."

Dean turned and Sam caught his eye, his expression concerned, and then looked down at the boy in his arms. Jamie had collapsed, limp and sobbing uncontrollably, reduced to pure hysterics.

"Yeah, I know," Dean said, and he shook out the match. "Something doesn't jive."

"I don't think this is a mind-whammy, Dean."

Dean turned back to the spirit. "Alright, you need to talk and you need to talk fast. What the hell's been going on here? If you didn't kill the kids, what did?"

"I told you," Jack gasped. "It's a fearling."

"The hell's a fearling? We've been from coast to coast hunting all kinds of monsters and I've never heard of one in my life," said Dean sharply.

"It's from the edges of the universe. Something that exists outside everything that is. They get in through the cracks. Usually, it's hard for one of them to get through, but the edges are thin now because of everything that's been happening recently. There's something weird going on in the world and there are more monsters, more spirits active. More fearlings are getting in."

"What exactly is it?" asked Sam.

"It's a creature made of living fear. It feeds off of the belief of kids, until it eventually sucks them dry. It does it over the course of a few days until it goes in for the kill and when it sucks the last of it out of them, it takes every bit of energy inside them - their life, their body heat, everything. That's why they freeze."

"You wanna explain why the kids think it's you?" asked Dean. "Why you were in Pippa's house and spotted by Mrs. Wilberson at her daughter's window?"

"_You_ think it's me, don't you? So does everyone else because it was freezing people. I think it figured out that they trust me and it's been using that to get them to open their windows. I was at the Wilberson's the one night because I was tracking it and wanted to see the room, wanted to see if it managed to break through the window. Then I was at Pippa's because Jamie said she's stopped believing - which meant it was leeching her belief away and going for her next. I got there just in time to fight it off, but it nearly gouged my face off and got away. You walked in right after. I was about to fly her to the hospital."

"And you expect us to believe you protect kids with the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Sandman?" asked Dean, his tone flat as the pancakes he'd had at the Burgess Diner that morning. "Because you were Chosen by the Man in the Moon."

"They're sort of like anthropomorphic personifications in reverse," insisted Jamie ardently. He explained quickly, "They were all human or just normal supernatural beings that existed in the world once and people started to believe in them and it made them into something more than they are. The Man in the Moon is just your standard lunar deity, just a powerful nature spirit. What people believe about the Guardians as myth figures isn't accurate. The stories are a little warped from who and what they really are, just like with vampires and werewolves and other monsters in the movies and on TV. I've known them all for four years now and I've seen them risk their lives over and over to protect kids from monsters. They're the real thing, just...different from what most people think."

"So there's a Santa," said Dean skeptically. "There's an actual Santa. Holly and jolly, belly like bowl full of jelly."

"He can be pretty jolly, but he's a lot tougher than he seems like in the stories," said Jamie.

"And a lot more...Russian," Jack put in. "He's a Cossack. Turned into what he is about 600 years ago."

"And the protective symbols?" said Sam, pointing up to the door.

"Jamie's idea," said Jack. "Tooth knew a few protective charms. We marked the bedroom doors of every kid in town. Sandy put a protective layer of dreamsand over every window, made it meld with the glass."

"Was that the cause of that weird yellow gloss?" Sam asked, remembering that the strange tinge had been on more than one of the kids' windows.

"Yep. And that's why the fearling needed to be let in - though it's strong enough now to break the glass like it did at Pippa's house."

"Jamie, how did you know to use the yan?" Sam asked.

"It's kind of a long story," Jamie said. "And I'd rather not talk about it."

"Here's a better question: how the hell did you do that for every house in town?" asked Dean. "And why this town?"

"How does Santa deliver presents in every house in the world in one night?" Jack pointed out. "We're good at bending the rules of reality a little bit and Burgess has a lot of kids who believe. Belief sustains us, and without it we fade out and stop existing. As long as there are some kids, somewhere, that believe in us, we can protect all kids everywhere. So it's like a - a fortification. A belief stockpile. We protect the kids and their faith here and we can fight another day, even if our enemies make kids stop believing everywhere else. Plus, this is my hometown and one of my enemies has a serious grudge against me and knows he can get to me personally by hurting the kids here. I've watched the kids here grow up for the last three hundred years. They needed the extra protection."

Dean and Sam looked at Jack, looked at Jamie, then looked at each other.

"It's possible."

"No, it isn't, Sammy. There's no way things like the Tooth Fairy can exist. There's gotta be a catch. There's gotta be something wrong with it, some way they're hurting people."

"Then who marked all the kids' doors? Those are protective symbols, Dean, they can't be used for anything else."

"Kinda bleeding over here," said Jack plaintively, his voice starting to sound a little out-of-it. "Can you just make up your minds already?"

"Dean, we have to at least consider it. Look at him, if he really was what killed those kids, why didn't he just freeze us to death where we stood?"

"He threatened to hurt us the other day."

"You were two dudes chasing around kids on playgrounds and going into their rooms with guns. You guys are the very _definition_ of stranger danger. How do you think that looked to me?" Jack pointed out.

Dean nodded his head to the side. "Okay, he has a point there." He rubbed the back of his head. "Okay. Okay, we're letting you up but you even_twitch_ the wrong way and we're lighting you up like a Christmas tree."

"I'm not going to fight you anymore unless you give me reason to," said Jack.

Dean moved over, carefully, gun still in his one hand and pulled out the silver stakes. Jack had to stifle a cry of pain as he pulled out each. Then, true to his word, he sat up, clenching his hands to try to put pressure on the wounds, and stared over at Jamie.

"You okay, kiddo?" Jack asked the boy shakily.

Sam finally let Jamie go and he ran over, about to launch himself at Jack for a hug.

"Hey, hey, whoa, covered in gasoline. You don't want this on you."

Defiant, Jamie took his blanket off the bed to use as a barrier between him and the gas, wrapped it around Jack, and hugged him anyway.

"I thought I told you to use the snowglobe and take Sophie to the Pole."

"I did," said Jamie. "But then I came back."

"How? I'm pretty sure North took all his other globes with him when Bunny took them to Budapest."

Jamie looked vaguely guilty. "I may have borrowed the sleigh."

"You borrowed the -"

Jack sighed and his eyes rolled up to the ceiling, but leaned into the hug and looked at the Winchesters.

"There's no chance of catching this thing tonight now," he said ruefully. "I doubt it'll show up with Sophie gone."

"You were using Sophie as bait, weren't you," said Sam. "But had her and Jamie protected with the salt. And these are anise seeds and leaves, for warding off nightmares."

"It works as well as the salt does. Using more than one form of protection never hurts." Jack shrugged. "I didn't like it, using Sophie, but the only way to catch it was figuring out one of its targets and attacking it when it came for them. Once it came in, I was going to ice it down to keep it trapped until Jamie took Sophie and made a run for it, then try to fight it. The salt and anise were in case it killed me before I could do that, so it couldn't get to them. If they waited it out 'til first light, it would've gone away because light hurts fearlings. I don't know _how_ I'm going to find it now."

"Maybe someone else at school will mention they've stopped believing," said Jamie. "Like Pippa did."

"That means we're back to square one, too," said Sam to Dean.

"Good job there, guys," said Jack with a slight glare. "A-plus monster-hunting."

Dean glared right back. "Well, if you hadn't been so goddamn creepy -"

"Do you feel that?" Jamie suddenly asked.

"Feel what?" asked Jack.

"I don't know, I just - I feel, like...tired. All of a sudden."

"Like...how?" asked Jack slowly, concerned.

Jamie tried to put words to it. "Like...like the world just got darker. Like the good things...aren't real."

The lights in the room suddenly flickered and went out, there was a crash of glass as the window shattered, and then a voice whispered to them all in the dark, one that was as brittle and unreal as it was sinister.

**_"I want to play now."_**


	3. Chapter 3

**A Colder Shade of Pale**

**by Saphie**

* * *

**Chapter Three**

"Jack!" Jamie called out.

Something was breaking. It was possibly Jack's bones, but it also might have been the bedside table, the plastic clothes hangers in the corner, or any number of breakable things around Jamie's room. Sam grabbed the kid and shoved him behind him as he and Dean got out their flashlights so they could actually see to fire at the thing.

Sam's mouth quirked into a disgusted expression when he saw it. It was one ugly mother. Hell, this thing was one ugly _grand_mother. He'd seen some ugly in his time, but this monster not only took the cake, it stole the entire bakery. Its mouth was long and droopy like it had a dislocated jaw and was filled with razor sharp teeth that reflected the light like glass or ice, like little icicles jutting out of the walls of its cavernous mouth. Its eyes were huge and covered in a gray film, and its twisted little limbs were thin and kept stretching and changing shape. Whatever shadow stuff it was made of never seemed to stand still and even the features of its disgusting little face were constantly morphing and changing, as if it was constantly spewing up new ugly faces to replace the old ones. It didn't seem to have legs unless it wanted to and then sometimes when it had them, it had too many.

They got a brief glimpse of Jack pinning it down, punching the crap out of it in a way that was honestly befitting of a Winchester, before it hissed at the light being shined on it, formed a leg in the middle of what could have arguably passed as its torso, kicked Jack off, and dove in the direction of Sam and Jamie.

Dean and Sam lined up a shot but Jack tackled the creature from behind.

"Frost, get out of the way!" Dean called out.

"Get Jamie -" Jack slammed the creature's head against the floor "- behind some salt!"

Then he stood, holding the creature tightly to himself as it desperately tried to squirm away, dragged it over to the smashed in window, and threw himself and the creature outside.

Sam and Dean turned to Jamie.

"Sam -"

"I've got Jamie, get out there," said Sam and as Dean ran out of Jamie's bedroom and stomped down the stairs, Sam snagged the can of salt that was on the ground and went about creating another salt circle in the room.

"I'm not just staying in here!" Jamie protested, picking up his baseball bat. "Jack needs help!"

"Yes, you are. That thing feeds on the belief of kids," said Sam, "and despite the twelve going on forty thing you've got going for you, guess what - you are one."

"But Jack -"

"Jack wants you to be safe. He'll stand a better chance of fighting that thing if he knows you are," Sam pointed out as he finished shuffling around Jamie, completing the circle.

"Stay here. I know we hurt him but now that we know he was trying to protect the same people we were, we'll help Jack, I promise," said Sam.

Jamie nodded, as he stood there in the center of the circle with his baseball bat, though he was clearly hesitant, and Sam turned and raced through the bedroom door, running down the stairs and out the back door.

The fight had moved away from the Bennetts' yard and to a field near a pond across the street. Sam ran across the street to find that both Jack and his brother had effectively had the snot beaten out of them already. Jack was carved up like a Christmas turkey, jagged claw-marks all over his body, his hoodie nearly completely in shreds. Between that and the beating they'd given him, Sam was amazed he was still standing, though it was clear he was barely able to. Dean was sporting a bloody nose, gashes on his face, and he was limping as he moved towards the thing, shooting it full of bullets.

"Salt repels it but it doesn't hurt it when you fire it at it," shouted Dean as Sam approached. "Sure doesn't seem to like silver bullets though."

"It's only going to hold it for a minute," Jack said critically.

"I don't see you offering any bright ideas, Captain Cold."

"Light hurts them, otherwise the few times we've managed to kill them, it was mostly by beating them so hard they couldn't stay coherent anymore. Or in Sandy's case, pumping them full of dreamsand until they explode."

"I like how this Sandy guy thinks."

"That'd probably be because you're a sicko," Jack pointed out.

"Can it, Sub-Zero."

"Fire," said Sam suddenly, as he aimed and fired while Dean reloaded. "Light hurts them, right? They can't get away from the light of a fire if they're what's burning in the middle of it."

"We should have built some flamethrowers for this," Dean grumped as he went over to the can of gas he'd carried down with him.

"It was your idea to clear the kids out and pin Jack here with silver and then just douse him," Sam said, shooting the thing over and over, making it reform every time. "You said flamethrowers and small rooms with stuffed animals and kids in them don't really mix."

Going in waving around one of their homemade flamethrowers in a situation like that had seemed a little too reckless. They'd figured that getting Jack stationary first, clearing out the kids, and then just torching the place down had been a better idea.

"It's good to know you guys consider the practical aspects of torching things around small children," Jack put in lightly.

"How are we doing this?"

"You still got the silver stakes you spiked me with?" asked Jack. He held out a bloody hand. "Gimme 'em."

"What?"

"You heard me."

Dean took them out of the pocket of his jacket where they'd been stashed and tossed them to Jack.

"Now stop firing."

Sam did since he needed to reload anyway and Jack dove in. There was another vicious scrabble, during which Jack stabbed the fearling repeatedly in the face, until he finally managed to pin the creature down with one of the silver spikes.

"Man, that kid's vicious," Dean remarked to his brother and Sam nodded, as Jack staggered away. Now that he knew said viciousness wasn't being directed towards children, he sounded impressed.

"Now!" Jack called out.

Dean and Sam moved forward and Dean hoisted the gas can over the creature, dumping its contents all over it. It writhed and hissed, a strange, utterly inhuman noise that sounded like wind being blown through holes in a sheet of dried human skin. (Which, incidentally, was a sound Sam had heard before. Hoooooray hunting.)

Dean put the gas tank down and got out his book of matches again.

The fearling, sensing its impending demise, suddenly did the unexpected. Its semi-amorphous body expanded like a balloon and the pressure was so great that the silver stakes ripped free, shooting into the air like corks popped from a bottle of champagne. Sam suddenly felt a sharp line of fire on his shoulder as one _fwapinged_ past him and he fell back, crying out, holding a hand there.

Dean was a lot less lucky. Sam heard a loud "_Grck!" _from his brother and he went down, dropping his gun in shock and wheezing, holding his neck.

"Dean!" Sam was at his brother's side immediately, completely ignoring the blood that had started to bloom on the fabric of his jacket where the spinning stake had cut his shoulder.

Much to Sam's relief, it looked like Dean had been lucky and rather than getting impaled through the throat, he'd been hit by the blunt end of the stake. He was still able to breathe but in pain and wheezing.

The creature darted over to jump on them both and Sam raised his Beretta, but one swipe of the fearling's clawed hand knocked it right out of his hands. Then it grabbed him by the shirt, claws tearing into his skin, pulling him away from his brother and throwing him several yards away. His head slammed right into a rock and though he didn't lose consciousness, the world started tilting back and forth. Disoriented, he tried to get up, but found it difficult to even sit.

Dean held out a hand, wheezing, trying to scrabble for his gun and get up and help Sam as the monster went in for the kill.

It raised its clawed hand high to slash - only to have a pale white hand grab its arm to stop it. Jack headbutted what passed for the fearling's head from behind and dragged it off of Sam, and then he and the creature were at it again, scrabbling around in the dirt, punching and clawing at each other. Again, the fearling climbed to its feet, but now Jack was clinging to its back like some kind of pasty undead limpet, trying to keep it away from the younger Winchester.

"Dean, the matches!" he called out. "Throw me the matches!"

Despite the pain he was in, Dean managed to scrabble for them in the dirt, and then he knelt and tossed the matchbook in the winter spirit's direction. Miraculously, Jack held out one hand and caught it, and still clinging to the monster, managed to tear a match free.

"Jack, wait, what are you doing?" Sam called out, but the fearling was lunging at him again. "Don't -"

For just a moment, his eyes met the boy's and he realized that what he thought was a mistake in the making was something Jack was doing on purpose. From the look in the spirit's eyes, he could tell that Jack hadn't forgotten that he'd been doused in gasoline, too.

He could tell because of the fear there.

What Sam saw underneath that fear made him realize Jack just didn't care.

It was like seeing the face of a parent trying to save their child, or - something Sam was very familiar with - a sibling trying to protect their sibling. There was something all-consuming under the fear that was stronger than it. In those young eyes - and also very, very old eyes - Sam saw a child that could look right through the adult trappings that locked it away and see the child that Sam had been. In an instant, Sam knew Jack was willing to die to protect the child he'd been and the man that child had become.

The spirit closed his eyes, preemptively wincing, and the sound of the match striking and lighting up might as well have been a gunshot.

"NO!" Sam screamed, but the halo of fire that explosively flared up around the two of them - and Jack's resulting scream - nearly drowned out the sound.

In a last gesture of hostility, the fearling tossed Jack off of its back like a rag doll, hurling the boy like a comet into the icy pond, where he went through the ice with a sickening crack.

Then it screeched a hideous screech, starting to boil into grotesque and terrible shapes, parts of it jutting out as if trying to escape the fire that had enveloped it. More arms and legs and tentacles than Sam had ever wanted to see in one place roiled around each other in a ball of pure awfulness before it finally withered away into nothing, the last of the flames exploding into black ashes that withered away in the wind and disappeared, leaving nothing more than a patch of smoldering grass.

"Dean, he might still be alive!"

Dean was finally on his feet now, his neck clearly horribly bruised, and he helped the still-dizzy Sam up and the two of them raced over to the edge of the pond, looking out on the ice. Even if Jack was still alive and conscious, he had drowned in his past life. It was entirely possible he still didn't know how to swim.

"Stay on the shore and try to break up the ice so we can surface," said Dean, his voice still hoarse. Kicking off his boots at the edge of the pond, putting down his weapons so they weren't ruined by the water, and shrugging off his jacket, he staggered out onto the ice, feet slipping as he did it. "Ah, cold! Cold! Sonofabitch, that's cold!"

Sam grabbed a stick and started smashing up the ice as soon as Dean was far enough that breaking the ice wouldn't send him into the drink sooner than he wanted.

"This is gonna suck," said Dean as he approached the hole Jack's descent had made through the ice. Taking a deep breath and steeling himself up with a miserable expression on his face, he jumped in through the hole Jack had made.

* * *

Dean had a few regrets. More than a few, really. Mistakes he made, people he couldn't save, ways he'd let people like his father - and Sammy - down. There was something about this mistake that dug down deep. Everything that Sammy had said about wishing there was something good out there was still knocking around in the back of his head.

Turned out he was right. Maybe there was something good out there. Maybe there were things - no, people - that weren't much different from the things that went bump in the night, but actually did something good with it. Jack had been human once, and the thing of it was, even with the ice and the immortality, it seemed like he'd never stopped.

Dean still couldn't see or feel Jack in the dark water and by now, his lungs were burning and his limbs were numb, but that only meant he swam down deeper. This kid tried to protect kids, and - more importantly than anything else - had saved Sammy from getting turned into monster chow. Dean was leaving the pond with him or not at all.

There was a glint of something white off to the left, and Dean turned in the water, swam even deeper, and finally saw what he was looking for, a pale skinny body, barely visible in the black. Dean couldn't tell what kind of condition he was in (other than drowned). Wrapping an arm around him, he kicked upwards until his hand brushed against the underside of the ice. Now where the hell was the shore?

_Don't panic. Not now_, he told himself, keeping a lid on the fear threatening to consume him.

He heard something through the water, concussive noises that he knew had to be Sam breaking up the ice and he swam in that direction, dragging Jack along with him.

Finally, there was an open space above him and the silty mud of the shore beneath his feet and he thrust his head out of the water, gulping down fresh air with ragged breaths.

"Have you got him?" Sam asked, and Dean yanked hard, pulling Jack's head up above the surface.

With Sam's help, he managed to drag the boy to shore. Once they got him under the light of the moon, he realized, to his great misery, that they weren't so much dragging a boy to shore as the _body_ of a boy to shore.

He wasn't breathing and there was no pulse and all the CPR in the world wasn't going to help, judging from the burns all over his body. He wasn't exactly crispy, but unless the nearest burn ward specialized in skin grafts for spirits, Dean wasn't sure where they could even get him help.

The thing that hurt even worse than knowing they screwed up was the look of regret Sammy's face when_ he_ realized that they screwed up. For once, they'd found proof there was something good out there amidst all the bad, just like Sammy was always hoping there was, and what had they done? They'd shot it full of rock salt, stabbed it, and gotten it set it on fire. Jack might have survived lighting up the Fearling if he hadn't been doused in gasoline himself. If he'd just let go and moved away, he might have been burned, but not set on fire.

"I don't know how we're going to break this to Jamie," said Sam, shaking his head.

It was right then that Jack started coughing, retching up water, making both Sam and Dean jump slightly in surprise.

"Get him on his side," said Sam, and they rolled the boy over in the recovery position.

For a minute, all he did was cough up water, and then he lay there quietly, chest rising and falling.

"Kid, you with us?" asked Dean. "Listen, we don't know what to do to help you. It's not like we can take you to a hospital."

"Just give it time," Jack rasped back.

Dean shot Sam a perplexed look but then they both saw what Jack was talking about. The burns were starting to heal over. In fact, Dean noticed, now that the blood was washed away, the wounds they'd inflicted on Jack's hands were already almost gone.

Even though he was healing, he didn't seem to be in the best shape emotionally. As he lay there on his side, he breathed in huffed, panicked breaths, his eyes squeezed shut. Tears were still managing to squeeze out.

It had to be horrifying to go through it again after having died that way once already. Dean shot Sam a look that said very clearly, 'Do that stuff with feelings that you do better than I do.'

"You're okay, Jack," Sam said quietly, getting the message, placing a hand on the boy's upper arm, where the skin looked already healed. "You're gonna be fine. Just breathe."

Finally, the boy calmed down a bit.

Dean sat there, watching as more burns disappeared.

"How are you doing that?"

"I heal fast," Jack explained, his voice still a little thick. "My skin was just having trouble healing up earlier because of the gas."

He managed to sit up now, though Sam kept a steadying hand on his shoulder where the burns had already faded. He wiped at his eyes and took a few deep breaths that seemed to calm him down. His shirt was pretty much gone now, other than a few tatters, so Dean noticed something.

"What's with the tats?"

There were tattoos on the spirit's chest in a strange script, over his heart. Dean realized after a moment that they looked a bit like the charms over the doorways of the kids.

"Sak yant," Jack answered. "Protective tattoo. It's mostly to prevent possession by demons, since we get them cheesed at us just about constantly. North knew of wicha practitioner that could figure out how to get it to stay rather than heal over."

"That's genius," said Sam. "Making an anti-possession charm permanent with a tattoo."

He and Dean shared a look. They were _so_ hitting a tattoo parlor after this. Dean reached over to grab his boots and jackets and pull them on. The jacket he especially needed - he was shivering after that icy dip.

"Yeah, well, the last thing the world needs is for Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy to get possessed by demons, right?" said Jack. "And I don't even wanna think about what would happen if it was possible for them to possess Sandman."

Jack wiped at his face and then pushed a hand back through what was left of his hair.

"This better grow back," he said warningly to the Winchesters.

If he was fussing over his hair, Dean figured he'd probably be fine.

"Jack, are you okay?" a voice called out and there was Jamie, struggling to walk over to them.

He was struggling because he was using a hula hoop as a barrier between him and the world.

"Jamie, I told you to stay inside the salt circle," said Sam.

"Technically, I did," said Jamie, nodding towards the hula hoop.

He was telling the truth. It was a rush job, but it looked like he'd used some kind of glue, maybe superglue, to cover the hula hoop with an unbroken ring of salt. He'd even attached straps to go over his shoulders, the bits attached to the hula hop covered with salt, so that he could wear the hoop with the ring of salt unbroken.

Jack couldn't help but laugh at the sight of it.

"Is he always like this?" asked Sam.

"All the time," said Jack, climbing to his feet. His steps were all stumbling, shaky ones, but he walked over to Jamie. "You can put that down. The fearling's gone."

Jamie shrugged off the straps and dropped the hula hoop, immediately running over to the winter spirit, throwing his arms around him. Jack hugged him back tightly.

"Are you okay? You're burned," Jamie said, pulling away just enough to look him over.

"I wouldn't say no to napping for a few days but I'm okay. This should heal up soon enough."

"We should get the pieces of your staff so you can fix it up. I saw them outside, but I didn't think I could carry them and the hula hoop at the same time."

"I don't know if I have the juice for that right now," said Jack, "but I need to keep it from getting broken even worse."

"It would be such a pity if it was," said a menacing voice behind them all, and there was a sudden snap of wood.

Jack didn't scream this time. After getting as hurt as he had, with the getting shot and beaten and stabbed and burned, it seemed as if he'd hit his limit on the screaming. Instead, his eyes rolled back in his head, a strange strangled noise erupted from somewhere deep in his chest, and he went limp in Jamie's arms, his knees giving out under him, dragging Jamie down with him.

"Jack!"

Dean and Sam turned to see a dark figure standing there, holding the pieces of Jack's staff. They were now broken even worse than they had been, a fragment of one still in one of the man's hands.

His skin was grey, his eyes were a beady yellow that coaxed the deepest instinctive hatred from the depths of Dean's soul, and the way he moved seemed almost liquid. He seemed half-melted into the darkness around them.

Dean quickly gathered up his weapons.

"Dean, I think that's the demon. The one we lost the trail of. It fits the description."

"A demon? Don't insult me," said the man. "I'm no demon. I'm not bound to the limitations and loyalties they are. They're practically insects in their mindlessness. There's an _art_ to what I do."

"Pitch," Jamie snarled, where he knelt next to Jack, holding onto him tightly.

"You again," said the man, Pitch, rolling his eyes just slightly. "Is there ever a time you're not going to be underfoot?"

"Is there ever a time you're not going to be a jerk so that we have to kick your butt?"

"You know him?" asked Sam and Jamie nodded.

"Pitch Black. Also known as the Bogeyman - and The Nightmare King, when he's feeling extra full of himself. He's the same kind of being the Guardians are, except instead of helping kids, he feeds of their fear. He's the Guardians' enemy."

"You sent the fearling," Jack croaked, where he leaned his head against Jamie's shoulder, with only his eyes directed at Pitch. "Those kids are dead because of you."

"I didn't send it, Jack. I can't control the fearlings - not yet. But when it showed up in this world, I may have offered it guidance and pointed it in the right direction. It would have killed children regardless of what I did - so why not in Burgess?"

Dean suddenly swung his shotgun up to aim at the man, but he disappeared into the shadows. His voice came to them from the dark, from every direction at once. Shadows in the shape of the spirit circled around them.

"Ah ah ah. There will be none of that, Mr. Winchester. That's not why you're here, after all."

"You set this whole thing up somehow, didn't you," Sam said slowly, figuring it out. It couldn't be coincidence that they and Jack were enemies of Pitch and that they'd all wound up turning against each other. "We were tracking you. You did this to put us off your trail."

"Give the man a prize!" Pitch said, his tone jovial. "It was easy enough turning the children's fear of the unknown into fear of Jack - just a few whispers in their ears. Arranging a distraction for the other Guardians in Budapest was easy enough, and after that, all it took was leaving the right newspaper with the right headline near your table in the diner. I knew either you'd be the end of him, he'd be the end of you in the course of defending himself, or maybe, just maybe, I'd be lucky enough to have you kill each other. Either way, I'd be down at least one enemy. You have my deepest gratitude in that respect, by the way. Thank you for softening him up and leaving him defenseless. You have _no_ idea how long I've been waiting for this."

Another snapping noise sounded out from the shadows. His body going rigid, his back arching, Jack let out a pitiful whimper, a mewling sound like one a child would make when they were inconsolable. Pulling away from Jamie, he curled in a pained ball on the ground.

"How 'bout you can the melodramatic monologuing, and show yourself, you ugly mother -" Dean called out.

"Oh, I think not," Pitch interrupted him. "I know what you'd do to me if I did. You're a man ruled by fear and people who are ruled by fear are absolutely _desperate_ to pretend they can assert their will on the world. You want to break me to prove that to yourself and don't even realize how broken that makes _you_."

"You don't know me," Dean snarled.

"Yes, I do. You're Dean Winchester. I've known you since you were a child. Of all the children that feared I might be lurking under their beds, you and Sam were always my favorites - because you knew that something might actually _be_ there."

"Like hell you were hanging around under our beds. Not with -"

"Not with all the precautions you took to keep out the dark and protect your baby brother? The little traps, the salt, the weapons?" said Pitch, and the expression on Dean's face fell before he could stop it. "Not with dear daddy always there to protect you? ...Oh wait. He _wasn't_ there, was he."

Dean and Sam both turned around, trying to pin down where the voice was echoing out from the shadows. Dean couldn't stop a stricken expression from showing on his face.

This clown had to be lying. He had to. Okay, so he'd messed up the one time with the shtriga, and Sammy had let things in the one time when he was hoping Santa was real, but he'd never let anything near him. Protecting Sammy had been - still was - his job and there was no way he was letting himself get convinced that sort of darkness was threaded back all the way into his childhood.

But the eyebrow-less wonder just wouldn't stop talking.

"It all fell on you to keep your brother safe. For the most part, you managed, but there was one way you couldn't, one place where you couldn't protect him and where you couldn't protect yourself." Pitch took a pause as if to savor the moment. "Your _nightmares_. Oh, the _fear_ you both gave me to work with. You couldn't possibly understand the hope that it gave me - that after centuries of no longer being believed in, there might be children that would start believing again, that would fear me the way they should - as something_ real_. If Jack had killed you to save his own life, I think I might have been upset to see you go. I'm glad it turned out this way instead."

Another snap of wood rang out from the shadows. A pitiful noise crawled out of Jack's throat like a living thing, a quiet broken sob that somehow sounded louder than the snap of wood that had provoked it.

"But I'm getting off subject. Don't think I've forgotten you, Jack."

_Things_ suddenly surged out of the shadows from all directions, causing Dean to instinctually shoot at one of them. It exploded in a turbid puff of glittering black sand. The rest of them pranced around them, neighing, and Dean saw that they were monsters in the shape of skeletal horses, their eyes glowing a sinister yellow, their bodies morphing and streaming along like ink through water.

Dean and Sam instinctually tried to circle around Jamie and Jack, but several of the nightmare horses reared up between them, purposefully separating them.

Slamming one in the head with the butt of his shotgun to move it slightly to the side so he could shoot it without accidentally hitting the boys, Dean saw Jamie through the ring of nightmare creatures, valiantly defending the fallen frost spirit. Somehow, whenever he touched one of the creatures, usually with a punch or a vicious slap, they would suddenly burst into a cloud of harmless golden dust. Dean tried it himself by punching one of them on the muzzle but it just recoiled and turned back to him, letting out an outraged whinny. Whatever it was that Jamie was doing wasn't something he could replicate.

Even then, what Jamie was doing wasn't enough. Even as the horses exploded into golden dust around him, more rose up in waves, surrounding him and Jack.

"Sam!" Dean called out as he fought his way through the wall, trying to get to Jamie and Jack.

"I know!" Sam called out, shooting one of the horses through the head and surging forward, too.

* * *

Jamie was losing and all Jack could do as he lay on the ground was curse himself for his own weakness. He tried to dig down deep for any hidden stores of strength that were left but after the beatings he'd taken tonight, near-drowning, getting set on fire, and the shivering weakness that came from the pain of having his staff broken, he could barely move.

Back when he'd been younger, when he'd been alive, he remembered a neighbor helping his horse deliver a foal that was sickly. Jack had watched it try to stand again and again, shivering and shaking with every attempt, before finally just...giving up.

He didn't want to give up like that.

He _thought_ he didn't want to give up.

But it had been a rough few years. Heck, it'd been a rough_ life_ at times.

Right now, as the darkness swirled around him and the nightmares loomed, as he lay on the ground, body aching, head pounding, his skin still raw, he was having trouble caring about getting up again.

The problem was that he'd had to do it too many times now. The other problem was that no matter how many times he did it, sometimes it just wasn't enough. In the end, there were still small caskets being lowered into the ground, even if what he'd done had ensured there would be less of them.

When he'd been human, he hadn't known the world was as dark as it was, other than knowing the normal small tragedies of colonial life. When he'd first become a spirit, young and carefree, he'd gotten glimpses of the dark, and sometimes faced horrible things that had thought he was easy pickins because he was alone, but he'd managed to mostly laugh his way through life. Now, after becoming a Guardian, after four years of fighting Pitch and even worse things that hid in the dark and preyed on children, it was getting harder and harder to see all that wonder North still claimed existed in the world.

Now, he got hurt again and again.

"Jack!" Jamie was screaming his name and he could see him surrounded by streams of gold sand, but the night-mares kept pushing in, separating them now. "Jack!"

Jack felt like he was hearing it from underwater. Trying one last time to get up, he managed to get into a sitting position, but standing - let alone fighting - wasn't happening anytime soon.

"You had your chance, Jack," came Pitch's voice low in his ear, and Jack turned to see that somehow he'd melted out of the shadows to crouch there, next to him.

Before he had a chance to react, the Nightmare King backhanded him across the face, sending him sprawling. Night-mares sprang forth in a wave from behind him and surged forward, dragging Jack along the ground. He cried out as he felt gravel and twigs scrape against the already raw skin of his back and sides, and then the night-mares morphed into tendrils of black sand that kept him pinned to the ground, exposed. The next thing he saw was Pitch towering over him, the shattered remnants of Jack's staff in his hands.

"You could have joined me. I could have even helped you protect them, Jack. The children. Even better than your fellow Guardians do. We could have ruled the world side by side, and the fear that we would have inspired in the children would have made us strong enough to face all comers, be they from heaven, hell, or the empty spaces in between. It would have been such a small price for them to pay, don't you think?"

"No, it would've been taking everything from them. There's no point in keeping them alive if all it means is they'll be alive and _miserable_."

"Look at the world we live in! Look at all there is to fear! They _need_ what I bring them. With so many things to be afraid, they _need_ fear."

Jack's eyes flickered over to Dean and Sam, trying to fight the darkness, any of their attempts to physically harm the night-mares with their own hands the way Jamie was doing proving to be utterly futile. If what Pitch had said about them as children was true, as boys, the two hunters had probably been the kind of kids that had set bear-traps to prevent North from showing up or put out a giant bug-zapper to take out the mini-fairies when they came for their teeth.

That was where fear got you. At least, that was where Pitch's kind of fear got you.

It shouldn't have been that way for them.

Meanwhile, Jamie, though he was afraid, was turning the night-mares back to harmless golden dream sand like he had the Midas touch. It wasn't that he was never scared, it was that he never let it stop him from living his life.

The world _was_ dangerous, and sometimes it was good to be afraid, but it was only worth living in if you could still feel joy, if you weren't_ always_living in fear.

"The kind of fear that keeps them alive and what you bring them are _not_ the same thing," Jack said and even though his voice was weak, his resolve was strong. "They don't deserve to just live, they deserve a _better world_."

"I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't miss these meandering, little philosophical talks of ours, Jack," said Pitch, throwing the remains of Jack's staff to the ground. He formed his scythe in his hands. "But it's time we finally got to the -"

"If you pun and say 'point,' then after you kill me, I'm going to find a way to haunt you," Jack said, cutting him off.

"I wasn't going to - oh shut _up_."

Incensed over being called on it, his expression vicious, he raised the scythe up high. Distantly, Jack heard Jamie screaming his name.

He closed his eyes tight.

Pitch declared dramatically, "I can't say it hasn't been fu - _zrghnftgh_."

He opened his eyes again to see Pitch convulsing where he stood, the scythe still held up high over his head. Then the scythe dissolved and Pitch fell over sideways in an utterly undignified sprawl of limbs. There was something sticking in his back, little electrodes that were attached to long wires, which were attached to a little gun held in Dean's hands. It looked like he'd managed to fire it through a gap between two of the nightmares, who whinnied in rage after they saw what had happened to Pitch and charged him, making him drop the tazer.

Shaking, Pitch tried to sit up, but his efforts were stymied by Jamie, who kicked him in the face and gathered up the shards of Jack's staff, bringing them over to him. The moment he set them down, he touched the tendrils of nightmare sand entangling Jack and they dissolved into dreamsand.

The night-mares quickly swarmed around Pitch, dragging him into the safety of the shadows. The removal of some of them from the fight finally allowed Dean and Sam to join Jamie and Jack and they quickly took their place providing them cover.

"Jamie, how do we take this guy out? You two know him better than we do," Sam said. "We've never dealt with anything like him and Jack before."

"He's strong enough to take on all the Guardians at once," said Jamie, arranging the pieces of his staff in front of Jack. "The only one of us that stands a chance against him is Jack."

Jamie helped Jack sit up. "C'mon, you need to put your staff back together."

More night-mares were surging out of the shadows, surrounding them.

"Jamie, I can't - I -" Jack could barely sit up. He had to lean against Jamie's shoulder just to stay upright.

His fingers still scrabbled weakly for the closest remnants of his staff but he knew he couldn't do this. He knew he had nothing left in him.

"Jack," said Jamie. "The fearling fed on belief. It fed on the belief of kids and you're a kid, too. You were fighting it hand to hand, it was touching you, leeching away the belief kids have in you and probably the belief you have in yourself. You can do this. You've fought through worse before, I've _seen_ it."

"M' too tired. I'm sorry -"

"That was a nice little trick, Mr. Winchester, but tricks won't help you anymore."

Pitch's laughter started echoing from the shadows again, building up into a rising crescendo that carried almost as much force as the roiling waves of night-mares the two hunters were trying to stave off.

Jamie readjusted his grip on the frost spirit, helping him sit up straighter. His eyes flicked over to the wall of night-mares now surging around them in the kind of whirlpool that ancient Greeks would have thought was the mouth of a sea monster. They caught Jack's gaze.

"Jack," he said, quietly, sincerely. "I'm scared."

There was faith in the gaze Jamie gave Jack. There was _always_ faith in the gaze he gave Jack. He had faith in the fact that all he had to tell Jack was that he was afraid and he knew it was enough for the Guardian to fix it -

No. He knew it was enough for the boy who might as well be his big brother to fix it.

The thing was...it _was_ enough.

Jack lunged forward, putting both hands on the largest broken pieces of his staff. The night-mares suddenly pulled away, streaming in the direction they'd last heard Pitch's voice come from, but it was more like the deceptive withdrawal of the sea before a tsunami than an actual reprieve. A wave of shadows rose up to a height higher than the nearby houses, looming up over them. Both Dean and Sam lowered their guns, staring up at a kind of darkness they'd never faced before.

"Come on, come on..." Jack muttered, as the tiniest little blue sparks danced to life at the ends of each broken piece of his staff. Frost from his hands curled in elegant curlicues over the wood, pulling the broken pieces together.

Pitch laughed even louder as the wave crashed down.

* * *

Sam could barely breathe as he looked at the wave of nightmares about to crash down on them, all twisting shapes and kicking hooves morphing together.

"Sammy..." Sam heard his brother say as he took his place at his side, obvious love in his voice.

"I know, Dean," he said. "I know."

There really wasn't anything else to say, was there?

"...You just Han Soloed me," Dean said with faux disappointment, and Sam couldn't help but laugh, even as darkness blotted out the stars.

Then, instead of the dark, blue light blotted out everything, briefly blinding Sam. The thin, high shrieking of a blizzard at its worst filled the air, and Sam blinked the afterimages away to see Jack standing in front of them, his repaired staff raised, the end of it braced against the dirt. Jamie was helping hold Jack upright as the light filled the entire field.

When it finally died down, the air was freezing cold and filled with the crisp sounds of ice and snow settling, and frozen black sand drifted down harmlessly, blanketing the field.

In the midsts of that uncanny snow stood Pitch, now looking slightly nervous.

"Now, Jack, there's no reason to take this persona -"

He was cut off by Jack firing another wall of cold energy directly at him, causing him to slam through several frozen trees, until he was pinned against a large boulder at the edge of the pond.

Jack just kept pouring the ice on. When he finally stopped, in the light of the moon, Sam saw that the nightmare spirit was frozen solid against the rock, his face stuck in an expression of surprise.

Sam looked over at Dean, whose eyebrows were raised.

"...Kid really was holding back with us, huh," said Dean.

Jack fell to his knees, half in Jamie's embrace, utterly spent.

"_Told_ you," Jamie said to Jack and even though the frost spirit looked like he was teetering on the edge of consciousness, he smirked back. "I told you you could do it."

"You're just lucky I had my Wheaties this morn -" The sound of splintering ice filled the field and Jack and Jamie looked over to where Pitch was encased in the ice with twin expressions of horror "- nngh."

The noise was just as panicked as it was inarticulate.

Shadow sand was spreading from Pitch's hands, causing the ice to splinter and all at once, it shattered and cascading down to the ground, freeing the Nightmare King. He started marching forward, a scythe forming again in his hands and Jack struggled to face him again but even with Jamie's help, he couldn't get on his feet and was too weak to raise his staff.

"That might have worked last year, Jack, but in case you haven't noticed, the world's changing, Jack. With what's coming, there's so much more to fear and you know how all that fear makes me strong. There's nothing that can protect the two of you now."

Sam nodded to Dean and the two of them ran in front of the boys, blocking the Nightmare King's way.

"Especially not _you_ two," Pitch said, with an eyeroll as he surged forward, using his scythe to knock away Sam and Dean's guns so that the rounds they fired went wide and slamming them both in the face with a wave of nightmare sand so that they fell in front of the boys.

"It's time to end this!"

He stepped forward, raising his scythe -

- and before it fell, the Easter Bunny leaped over the heads of all four young men, tucking into a roll as he landed, and hopped up to kick Pitch in the stomach, sending him sprawling backwards.

"The fu - " Dean started to say, but Sam saw him drop into a bewildered silence that echoed his own when a figure flew in, a blur of green and blue and whizzing wings, somehow slashing at Pitch's scythe in a way that made it shatter into a cloud of harmless black sand.

Before he could even strike back, a tendril of glittering gold whipped down from above, firmly latching around Pitch's ankle, yanking his feet out from under him. His dress fell down over his head as he was hurled up into the air - where a little golden man with wild, wavy hair was floating on a cloud - and dragged back down again and slammed into the ground.

Multiple times.

The little man floated down to land behind Pitch, his expression ferocious, whips held in each hand.

Pitch cowered now, crawling back towards the pond, trying to get away from the three figures advancing upon him. Sam saw the blurring green and blue figure resolve into the form of a beautiful young woman all covered in feathers, the crest on her head flaring in a way that suggested future violence was forthcoming.

Now that they weren't moving, Sam saw that all three figures looked haggard, feathers and fur ruffled and ragged, sand sifting and shifting in ways that seemed unnatural - as unnatural as they could for a man made of sand anyway.

"If this is about Budapest..." Pitch started nervously, getting up and trying to run.

He ran right into the massive chest of a man that was taller than even Sam, dressed all in red furs. He looked as worse for wear as his comrades, the fur of his clothes singed in a few places, a chunk of his beard missing and still growing back in. He didn't look quite as furious as the others but his violent intent was made clear by the way he grabbed Pitch by the collar and lifted him right off the ground.

"Is partly about Budapest, yes," he said in a thick Russian accent. "But is mostly about how we keep running into each other this way. This goes much farther now than being on naughty list, Pitch."

'Naughty list'...?

Hadn't Jack and Jamie said Santa was Russian?

Sam reached over and smacked Dean in the stomach, not realizing he was doing it with all the excitement of a small child that's seen something really, really cool.

"Dean," he said in a hushed voice. "_Dean_. I think that's Santa."

"Yeah, that's great, Sammy, kinda busy trying to wrap my head around Harvey and Tinker Bell here."

Pitch broke away from Santa and managed to scoot past the other myth-people in a terrified crab-crawl. They turned as one to advance on him.

"Now now, let's not do anything rash -"

"Rash?" interrupted the giant anthropomorphic rabbit, jabbing a boomerang in Pitch's direction viciously. "You want to know what's rash? Locking kids in a school with a flock of valravn. Only wait, that wasn't thoughtless on your part, was it? You just thought they were worth the sacrifice if it meant it caught our attention. You've got space to sell between your ears if you think we're letting it go this time."

"They were just valravn, nothing you couldn't handle," Pitch insisted, backing away.

"We barely got those kids out alive!" snarled what could only be the Tooth Fairy, her hands held in a way that made her manicured nails look more like talons.

The little man made of sand raised one finger to tsk tsk.

"This time is not like other times, Pitch," said Santa, pointing a sword Pitch's way. (Since when did Santa carry swords?)

"You mean like the times I got away?" said Pitch with a sudden toothy grin. "I'm afraid it is."

Black sand suddenly formed an explosive cloud around him, almost like a smoke bomb. The little man whipped his sand whips out, the Bunny threw his boomerang, and Santa and the Tooth Fairy surged forward to attack but the cloud dissipated, revealing that Pitch was already long gone.

The four of them - the ones Jamie and Jack had called the Guardians - all looked around frantically, eventually stamping the ground or clenching their fists in their disappointment.

"We'll find him," said the Easter Bunny. "He's been getting reckless. Trying to make his power grab before he gets muscled out of the way by the demons. And even if we don't get him, they will, at least, so they'll be the only things we have to reckon with."

The Tooth Fairy looked over towards Sam and Dean - and the two boys behind them - and suddenly cried out, "Jack!"

Zipping over like a shot, she dropped on her knees in the dirt next to Jack and Jamie and wrapped her arms around the frost spirit.

"Jack, are you alright?"

"I'll be okay," Jack said faintly.

She reached a hand for Jamie's shoulder.

"Jamie, are you hurt?"

"I'm okay, Tooth. Jack got the worst of it."

The other three walked - and in the case of the man who could only be the Sandman, floated - towards them.

"Did Pitch do this to him?" North asked, eyes wide.

"Some of it," Jamie answered, as Tooth gathered Jack up in her arms. Jamie held onto his staff for safe-keeping. "The fearling did some of it, too. The rest..."

"Who did the rest?" asked Bunny, eyes narrowed, then flicking over to the two hunters suspiciously.

Jamie jerked his thumb towards Sam and Dean.

"These two idiots," Jamie answered.

"Uuuuh..." Sam said, climbing to his feet as several very angry-looking spirits advanced on him and Dean.

Dean stood up as well, shifting awkwardly, an equally awkward smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. When North stopped, arms folded crossly in front of him, his sleeves shifted enough that Sam could see tattoos there. Dean saw them, too, and he pointed, still awkwardly.

"Nice tats," he said with a slight shrug, in his trying-to-break-the-ice voice.

Santa looked at his tattoos, where one of the designs shifted to letters in a language Sam probably still couldn't have read even if he'd gotten a better look at it. It looked too alien. The bearded giant sighed and looked back at the two brothers.

"Of _course_ it is Winchesters," he said, raising a bushy eyebrow.

To Sam's great bewilderment, the other Guardians all gaped and then let out various noises of aggravation - and familiarity. The Sandman even rolled his eyes.

"I guess we ruddy well should have known it was just _practice_ back then -" said the Bunny, gesturing angrily in their direction with a boomerang. He turned to look at them, frowning, hopping in place slightly in his agitation. "- and that you two would grow up to be_ just_ like your dad."


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** And that's a wrap! Hope you enjoyed.

* * *

**A Colder Shade of Pale**

**by Saphie**

* * *

**Chapter Four**

"What year was it that I lost that chunk of my ear, thanks to their dad? Ninety-one?"

"No, that was the year one of my mini-fairies got trapped in a cage and had to be rescued by the others. You lost the chunk of your ear in Ninety-Three, then in Ninety-Four Sandy got hurt by that seal they had up."

Sandy nodded vigorously.

"Not once, not one Christmas was I ever able to get in. Lost boot thanks to a bear trap. _Twice_."

"Dean, we could have gotten presents from Santa. From _Santa_."

The Guardians were, fortunately, nothing more than annoyed about the past misfortunes they'd suffered at the hands of the Winchesters - and maybe even a little amused.

The group was now gathered in the dining room of Jamie's house. The Sandman had already dusted the neighbors, ensuring that they didn't call the cops over the racket and that they chalked the whole ruckus up to a bad dream. Already, North had used what appeared to be magic snowglobes to summon actual yetis to come in and start fixing up the house. They'd brought Jamie's sister Sophie with them from the North Pole and blast of dreamsand from the Sandman had conked her out. She was now sleeping in her room after having been tucked in by Jamie, with two yetis posted on watch (just in case Pitch planned on a surprise visit).

The Guardians had explained to Sam and Dean more of what they were, of who they'd once been, of what they did. They'd absorbed it all with a few questions and mostly awestruck silence, but now they were explaining what they'd been talking about when they'd recognized them.

The kitchen table had been converted into a makeshift first aid outpost. Jack sat with his back to the edge of the table while Tooth picked twigs, gravel, and other debris out of the scraped skin there with tweezers.

"Ow! That hurt," he groused.

"The sooner we get this cleared out, the faster it'll heal over," said the Tooth Fairy matter-of-factly. "You look like you got set on fire today -"

"I did."

"- and you're complaining about me picking out some splinters?"

"The getting-set-on-fire thing is _why_ the picking out splinters hurts so much," Jack said sulkily.

At that, Tooth's expression softened to one of great fondness and she rubbed the fuzzy, now-healed back of Jack's head gently.

"It won't be much longer. Your body's pushing most of it out on its own." And the rest had been washed out with the wound irrigation solution Jamie had so resourcefully provided from his first aid kit. "Now stop squirming."

"So, okay, back to the war stories," said Jack, wincing but not whining now as Tooth tended to him. "Did _any_ of you guys manage to get through to deliver your presents and dreams and stuff?"

"I'm gonna say no, seeing as we never actually got any," said Sam sheepishly.

"Other than the dreams but unless Sandy here's responsible for the fun kind you get after reading the latest issue of Busty Asian -"

Sam clasped a hand over his brother's mouth.

"We had normal dreams, but we didn't get the sparkly magical dreams, either," Sam said, ignoring the awkward looks from the Guardians. "Probably because of the seals our dad put up to keep out nightmare demons like mara. Those had a wide enough spread to have hit friendly spirits, too."

"Then how did that David Bowie video reject get in? Do you think he was telling the truth about that?" Dean asked, after pulling Sam's hand away from his mouth.

"It's possible that despite all your defenses, Pitch did," said Tooth, looking up from Jack's back. "He travels through the shadows."

"Not many myths and creatures out there travel like he does," said Bunny, leaning against a buffet table, arms crossed. "He can get places even some demons can't."

"Okay, so, we managed to block out all the really great stuff from childhood, like getting Christmas presents, but not the Bogeyman," Sam said dryly, still deeply resentful of this fact.

"None of you, though?" repeated Jack, looking around at the others, in disbelief. They never missed a child. Never. "Not even once?"

"Is unfortunate, but between the traps - and sometimes their father - it just could not be done. And then they were grown," said North. "Ah, but past is past. All is forgiven and today we fought on same side. Despite misunderstanding, Jamie and Sophie are safe, fearling has gone kaput, and Jack will heal soon enough." North clapped both brothers on the back so hard they stumbled. "I am hoping you two will forgive us as well. We tried to bring our gifts and we have such regret we could not."

"Nothing you could do about it when we had every motel room we stayed at locked up like a supernatural fort Knox," said Dean, shrugging.

"Besides, we were rough on our toys growing up, anyway" said Sam. "You should've seen what we did to the Impala. I got an army man stuck in the ashtray, Dean shoved Legos into the vents. They were probably better off going to someone else."

Hearing that - and the mention of staying in motels - made Jack perk up just slightly.

"The Impala...big ol' muscle car?" he asked slowly. "Chevy with a black exterior? I saw one down the road after the attack at Pippa's."

"Yeah, why?" asked Dean.

Jack looked as if he was digging back into his memory, and he looked at Dean and Sam's faces as if he was trying to mentally strip the years and troubles away

"Sunnyside Inn, Pawhuska, Oklahoma," Jack said, a smile lighting up his face. "Winter of '94. It was early December, I think.

Sam and Dean shared a bewildered look and then Dean's eyes went wide. "Dad was hunting those vamps, remember?"

Sam looked back at Jack, his expression guarded. How did he know that? How could he possibly know they'd been there?

"How do you -"

"Heck of a snowstorm, wasn't it?" Jack said, the corner of his lips twitching. The smile faded. "You were...you were alone. I just happened by. And I - I didn't know what to do about it. It didn't seem right. I saw your dad take you in and then leave and I saw you through the window. I didn't understand why he'd leave you alone."

Both brothers squirmed uncomfortably.

"Like I said, he had some bloodsuckers to take care of," Dean repeated.

"You looked like you could use a little fun. So I whipped up a little snowfall. And when you went out to the gas station to get something to eat - pow, snowball right in the back of your head," Jack looked like the only reason he wasn't bouncing on the table was because Tooth was still working on his back. Behind him, Sam could see a gentle smile on her face. "You thought your little brother had done it, so you retaliated and then it was pretty much all-out war. You made the best snow monster I've ever seen, by the way."

"How - how do you remember that? That was over a decade ago," asked Sam. "You didn't even know our names."

"I saw the Impala. The one with the little army man in the ashtray and the legos in the vents. I poked around, wanted to see what your dad was doing dragging you around and leaving you alone in motels."

"How come we didn't see _you_?" asked Dean suspiciously.

Jack's face fell a little. "I didn't have believers back then. No one could see me except for other myths."

"Still, that was a whole _decade_ ago..." Sam went on.

"I never forget a kid. None of us do. They might grow up and their faces might change so we don't recognize them anymore, but we never forget one of them." Jack's smile was back. "We had fun that day, didn't we?"

The thing was, as unnerving as it was to know now that an invisible spirit had been there flinging snowballs at them that day...they had. It was one of the few times during Sam's life that stood out in his memories as a time he actually got to be a kid. For one glorious afternoon, he and Dean had been making snow monsters and snow angels and tackling each other to stuff snow down each other's jackets. It'd been a no-holds-barred brotherly snow-brawl and there were few other times during Sam's life that he ever remembered seeing Dean laugh like that.

Next to him, Dean had a strange expression Sam couldn't place, one that he imagined maybe matched his own.

"Ha!" Jack laughed, "Got you even when the other Guardians couldn't and I wasn't even a Guardian yet. Man, I'm good."

Before Sam could think of anything to say, Jamie stomped down from upstairs. A book he hadn't been carrying before was in his hands.

"North, the yetis are going a little overboard and trying to build me a balcony. Can you explain to them that my mom's going to kinda notice that when she gets home in the morning?"

"Of course. They are sometimes a little over-ambitious. I'll go set them straight."

North bustled up the stairs, which creaked under his massive booted feet.

"Sandy, come to think of it, we should head up, too, mate. Window needs to be re-glossed with dreamsand if they're finished putting a new one in, and I wanna check on Jamie and Sophie's doorframes, make sure the yan are still intact."

The Sandman nodded and he floated after Bunny as he hopped up the stairs. That left Jack, Jamie, Tooth, Sam, and Dean alone in the dining room.

Now that the room wasn't as crowded, Jamie worldlessly went over to Jack, leaning against his shoulder, unable to give him a full body hug because of his injuries. Tooth stopped her picking long enough for Jack to hug him back.

"Hey, kiddo, it's okay."

"My room's a mess."

"They'll clean it up."

"There's a place where the wall's caved in because the fearling smashed your head into it," Jamie said shakily.

Jack hugged him more tightly. "I'm fine. I promise I'm fine." There was silence for a second, until he finally said, "So I'm your brother now, huh? Officially adopted?"

"Duh. We didn't have to be born that way for it to happen," Jamie pointed out, leaning back to look Jack in the eye. "My uncle Lenny always says family doesn't end with blood."

That made Sam suck in a sudden, surprised breath and made him even more curious than he already was. The more he thought about it all, the more he couldn't wrap his head around all this. Spirits that protected children, that had even been threaded through his personal history - through the history of_ most_ children. A three hundred year old spirit that wasn't going around murdering people...

Dean got the question out before he did.

"How'd you do it?" he asked Jack. "That's the thing I don't get in all this."

"How'd I do what?" Jack asked.

"Your sister died, right? You died. You had every reason to be bitter and turn into the kind of spirit that kills, and here you are, sharing a Full House moment with the kid here. How'd you pull it off?"

The way he said it made it clear that he didn't think he could have managed the same himself. Sam knew his brother enough to know what he was thinking right then, and he was thinking about how it would've felt to die, and have his brother die, and be left behind, bitter that it had happened to the both of them.

"Most spirits get corrupted over time, even if they're coherent when they first appear. They usually get erratic - and violent," explained Sam. "Even if they're well-intentioned to start with or just trying to get justice, they usually wind up hurting people - sometimes people that don't deserve it. That's what we don't understand about you. The others here, I don't know if they died, too, but we know you did. And if people couldn't see you until you were believed in...how long_ was_ that?"

Jack licked his lips, as if he was hesitant to talk about the subject. "About three hundred years," he finally said. "I was alone for - for three hundred years. Didn't really get along with other myths and no one could see me..."

Tooth brushed a hand against his shoulder and he looked over at her, gratefully.

"The Guardians and other myths didn't know that I was doing that badly. I always had the whole rebel-without-a-cause chip on my shoulder thing going on so they thought I was okay."

He looked back to Sam and Dean. "And they didn't die. Belief changed them into what they are. I'm the only one of us that did. The Man in the Moon brought me back. Part of what saved me is that, I think - I'm not just a spirit."

He held up a pale hand.

"I mean, I am...but I'm not at the same time. Somehow. This is my body. I didn't remember who I was when I first came back, though. Maybe it was the trauma, I don't know."

"So...you didn't remember what happened to your sister?" asked Sam.

"Not for a long time - but you're wrong about her dying, anyway," explained Jack. "She _didn't_ die. We were skating and the ice was thin. I managed to get her off of it, but I wound up sliding onto the thin ice myself doing it. And it broke. And I - I drowned. But she didn't die. I _saved_ her."

He went on, "That's why the Man in the Moon brought me back, why he chose me to be a Guardian. Even though I didn't remember any of it, I think...somehow a part of me knew. Somehow, I knew that there had to be a reason for all of it - that maybe it was a good reason, even if it hurt not knowing what it was for such a long time."

"So wait, you saved your sister, died, lost your memory, were alone for three hundred years, and didn't do a vengeful Hulk-out, even after all that?" Dean asked.

Jack shrugged and then winced, looking like he immediately regretted it becauase of his injuries. "I wanted people to notice me, to believe in me. I wanted to not be alone," Jack admitted. "But I just...never wanted to hurt anyone. Why would I?"

Sam remembered what his grave had said. "Good son, loving brother, brave soul." It all made sense now. He knew what it felt like to stand there on the ice as it was cracking, hoping against hope he could do the right thing to make sure his sibling was okay. Though the ice was metaphorical, he and Dean had to do it for each other all the time. He understood the sacrifice. Like Dean, what he didn't understand was how he'd held it together afterward. Was it possible for someone to just be that good?

Apparently, Dean thought so. He looked actually impressed. "I only wish the gribblies we usually meet had your attitude, kid."

Tooth smiled at that and zipped back into the air. "Be right back. I need to wash these out again."

As she fluttered out, Dean angled his head just slightly to catch sight of her feathered behind.

"Let me help you with that..." he said, following her into the kitchen.

Jack's face immediately fell and immediately became about 200% more sardonic than it had been moments ago.

"So, let me get this straight. You guys shot me full of rock salt, stabbed me in the hands, and doused me in gasoline so that I wound up getting set on fire..."

"Sorry," interjected Sam.

"...and now he's flirting with my girlfriend."

Sam cringed. "I am so, _so_ sorry."

"No no, it's okay," Jack said lightly. "After a night like tonight, I could use a laugh."

"Times like these are why I wish I always carried around popcorn," Jamie added, as they looked into the kitchen. The quiet conversation there, replete with Dean leaning against the counter and saying something too low for all of them to hear got more and more quietly hostile, until Tooth was grabbing him by the ear.

"Ow ow ow! You're the Tooth Fairy! I thought you were supposed to be nice!"

"I'm nice to children," Tooth corrected him, finally letting go and tossing up her head at him as she fluttered back into the dining room. "Not to grown men who _act_ like children."

Sam laughed. "I can see why you like her."

"Tooth: Kicking butt and taking names since oh-five." Jack added, "Like the year five, I mean. Not the year two-thousand and five."

Back at Jack's side, she pressed a kiss against his forehead.

"You could have drawn that out a little longer, you know," said Jack, nodding towards the kitchen. "You didn't give me any time to sell tickets."

She took a moment to look at his face and smile at him. Then, as she took in the hair still growing in and the burns still smoothing over, the smile faded slightly and she leaned against him, one hand moving up to hold his head gently against her neck and shoulder.

"One day at a time, Tooth. That's what we decided to worry about," he reminded her.

"I know. It just worries me how much harder it's getting to always make it to the next one."

Jamie answered Sam's questions before he could even ask them.

"It's been getting worse out there for them," he said. "Jack said something big is going on."

"Like what?" asked Sam.

"We don't know yet. But everything's getting more active," said Tooth. "That's why we tried to reinforce the houses in Burgess with the sak yant and the dreamsand on the windows. The yan symbols were ones in the Tooth Palace, but we never would have thought of putting them in the rooms of all the kids if Jamie hadn't suggested it."

"How did you know about that, anyway?" Dean asked. "You keep dodging the subject, kid. Pippa said it was some reason she wasn't willing to share because it was personal business of yours."

"I figured you were going to push it with that," said Jamie and he reluctantly held out the book he'd brought from downstairs and had been carrying in his hands. "That's why I went up and got this to show you. Kind of explains itself."

Dean took the leather-bound notebook from Jamie's hands and started thumbing through it. After a few pages, he nudged Sam.

"This is a hunter's journal." He looked back at Jamie. "Kid, where'd you get this?"

"It was my dad's. Apparently, he used to run around hunting monsters before my sister and I were born. He and my uncle Lenny did it together." Jamie's next words were reluctant. "When I started getting into all this stuff with the Guardians, and getting myself into trouble around town, my uncle Lenny found out. He told me the truth about what my dad used to do - and how he died. Not long after my sister was born, my dad freaked out about something local, some monster that had shown up, and he and my uncle went after it. My dad didn't - he didn't make it. My uncle made up some story about their car crashing and that's what me and my mom and sister believed for years until Uncle Lenny told me the truth and gave me my dad's journal. Last year, he told me to be extra careful to hold onto it and gave me the number of some guy named...Bobby, I think, that he told me to call if I ever got into trouble with this kinda stuff. Anyway, that's where I got the idea for the sak yant. And theeen he disappeared. We have no idea what happened to him. Prob'ly the same thing as my dad."

"Small world," said Dean, at the mention of Bobby. He kept looking over the pages of the book - at some of the graphic illustrations and gruesome pictures inside it. "Listen, kid, just because your dad was a hunter, it doesn't mean that's a road you have to go down."

"Who says I want to take up hunting?" Jamie said skeptically.

"...Because monsters killed your dad," Sam said slowly.

"Yeah, because he was so paranoid he went out looking for them since he felt like he had to take them all out first to protect his family. That monster was like towns over and other hunters knew about it. I love him and miss him and I'm proud of him for the good he did, but if he hadn't been so obsessed, we wouldn't have grown up without him."

"So...you don't want to be a hunter?" Sam asked slowly.

"What am I supposed to do," Jamie said skeptically, "take up an obsessive vendetta to kill the thing that killed him?"

Sam and Dean both stood there, shifting in place awkwardly, opening and closing their mouths as they tried to figure out a response.

Jamie snorted. "I've made sure I know enough to protect my family and friends and take down anything in my hometown but I got stuff to do. My home movies aren't going to make themselves. I help out the Guardians sometimes, but that's it."

"Huh," was all Sam could manage to say.

"Besides, I can help fight against those things in other ways. I wanna make scary movies that follow the rules the real monsters do so people learn how to fight them through pop culture. There's other ways to make the world better, you know? Just because I know that stuff's out there doesn't mean I have to make it my life, if that's not the kind of life I want. That'd be pretty crazy, right?"

"...Yes," said Sam quickly. "Crazy. Totally crazy."

Dean opened his mouth to say something that Sam figured might be insulting and Sam jabbed him hard in the ribs to shut him up.

"You're happy, right?" Sam asked him.

Jamie shrugged. "Even though I run into scary stuff sometimes, yeah."

"That's what's important."

At that, Jamie took back his father's journal and smiled, going over to where Jack and Tooth were quietly talking and joining in.

Sam took the opportunity to have a quiet talk with Dean.

"Rose-colored glasses, man," said Dean. "The Guardians might not always be around to protect him. Pretending that stuff isn't out there won't make it go away. Not that it's bad he's turning his back on it, though. If he can, more power to him. He's too young for all this."

"I don't know," said Sam slowly. "That's just it, Dean, I think he's well aware of what's out there. I think maybe he's afraid of it, too. I just think maybe they've taught him to face it so he can live whatever life he wants."

"What good is that, though? The sunshine and daisies and magical fairies and all that? What good is that when all the rest of it is out there?"

"What if...what if what they do is make it so kids are brave enough to face that without forgetting how to be happy? What if they make it so they're protected, and brave enough to protect themselves, without - without giving up, I don't know, a sense of joy?"

Dean looked stymied by that, as if he was having trouble wrapping his head around the possibility.

"Maybe that's the difference," said Sam slowly. "Maybe that's the difference between being a hunter and - and being a guardian."

Silence reigned between the two of them and in that space, rising out of the mists of that emptiness was a truth both of them knew but always tried to ignore.

"Dad did the best he could, you know," said Dean, but the argument was weak, as if he was having more and more trouble believing that himself.

Sam had no answer for that.

All he knew was that one of his happiest childhood memories he had nothing to do with his father. That memory was one that involved his brother, a snowball fight, and a spirit that had apparently cared more about his and his brother's innocence in one moment than his father had in his whole life.

* * *

"Is time to say goodbye, Winchesters. We wish you many safe travels," said North.

Jamie's house had been fixed up, Jamie and Sophie had been tucked in for the night, and the Guardians had reassured Sam and Dean they'd keep an eye on things.

The funny thing was...Dean actually believed them. He trusted them. Apparently, the weather forecast was a bit nippy in hell right now.

They were outside the Bennett house in the empty street under a starry sky. It was weird, but somehow, to Dean, the stars seemed a little brighter and when he looked at the full moon above, he got the weirdest sense someone was watching over them.

"Listen, you gumbies," Bunny added gruffly. "You need to watch it when you're out there. There are other myths out there like us just minding their business, not meaning any harm - or even helping in the fight against the nastier things. Make sure you you tone down the friendly fire." He added reluctantly, "That said, anyone that goes after the things that go bump in the night is right with me. Good luck out there. And be careful - there's a storm brewing. Big things are happening. We're not sure what's behind it yet but keep your eyes open."

"Thanks for the warning," said Sam. "Good luck to you, too."

"Ah! I almost forgot. Before you go, there is one more thing," said North, pulling out a sack from the inside of his coat and reaching into it. "We were not able to give you our gifts when you were younger - maybe there is something we can be doing now."

Dean snorted. "I think we're a little old for toys -" Santa pulled something shiny out of the sack and Dean's eyes popped open wide. " - Is that a A.H. Fox HE Grade shotgun?"

Dean took it into his hands eagerly, and then gaped as Santa handed him several boxes of shotgun shells.

"Let's see what else magic sack has for you."

The second thing he pulled out was a pie. A crisp, absolutely beautiful apple pie. It was in a box emblazoned with the name "Bramby's."

"That was the best pie I ever had," Dean said eagerly, stuffing the ammo in his jacket pockets and eagerly taking the pie from North. "Little place in Alabama. Closed down in '98."

"And for you, Sam..." said North, reaching in. He pulled out a very fancy-looking laptop.

"This - this isn't even on the market yet," Sam said, eagerly taking the laptop in his hands.

"Ah ah ah! That's not the only thing."

Now he pulled out a musty leather-bound book.

"A copy of Grabon's Guide to Myths and Spirits! I've been looking for a copy for years!"

"Is just a little something, since we could not give you such gifts when you were young. Least that can be done is giving you something now."

They meant it. Dean could read the sincerity on their faces like it was scrawled all over them in permanent ink. They meant it, they meant good will, they felt compassion - and if they were as old as they said they were, that compassion had endured. They had endured. They might still endure, even if the world got dimmer and the nights got longer.

"Thanks," Dean said unsteadily. "Jack, uh, sorry about everything, kid. Keep fighting the good fight."

"You too," Jack said, all hard feelings seemingly having evaporated in the light of the moon.

"Be careful out there," Sam said to them, and when he and Dean walked way, Dean could see the smile on his brother's face.

* * *

As the Guardians took off in the sleigh, Jack looked down at the brothers, fading away to small figures on the street below.

"It kind of scares me, knowing they're out there. I almost bit it because of them." He drew in a deep breath. "And yet it's reassuring at the same time. It's weird."

"You did not die," North said. "Think of what such a thing means, Jack, that there are good men and women out there in the world fighting against the dark. Ones that take a moment to pause when they think they are doing wrong. They may be the ones we could not save, that have very little light left in their hearts, yet they still fight."

"If anything happens to us, mate, they'll still be out there," Bunny pointed out. "They'll still be fighting. Even if there aren't any Guardians, they'll still be trying to guard themselves."

"And just like there are things they don't stand a chance against that we handle, think about the things that could destroy us that only humans can fight," Tooth pointed out. "

Sandy tried to say something complicated with his sand symbols, but Jack couldn't quite understand it.

"Sorry, Sandy, not really understanding you, buddy."

North translated, "Sandy is saying the world needs Guardians, Jack, but it sometimes needs those who can walk in shadow without being corrupted by the dark."

Jack nodded slowly, taking all that into consideration. Then his eyes got a little glassy as he thought back.

"They were such sweet kids. I mean, you could tell they were siblings a mile off, with how much they loved each other. It stuck out in my head, made me - made me almost-remember things," Jack said, hands gripping his staff more firmly. "I knew something was wrong with their dad leaving them alone. I wish I could've done more back then than giving them a snowball fight."

"Jack, if there's one thing I've learned from protecting the memories of the children, it's that sometimes one good memory is all it takes to make someone's life better. Sometimes it's all it takes to save them. You did what even we couldn't," Tooth said gently. "And aside from that, maybe...maybe tonight you did more than you realize."

* * *

"So," Dean said slowly, as they made their way back to the Impala, arms full of back-due presents. "This is new. And weird as hell."

"Yeah," said Sam, and his smile wasn't going away. There was the sound of jingling bells and they both turned to see the silhouette of sleigh, drawn by reindeer, passing in front of the moon. "Sometimes new is a good thing, though."

Dean grinned as he opened the trunk and carefully placed the shotgun and rounds inside. He was still grinning as he hopped into the Impala, placing the pie in the backseat.

"Man, Santa had some bitchin' tats, didn't he?" said Dean as he started up the car.

The Impala revved to life like the beautiful beast it was, and like it always did, it roared off into the night.

Only day was breaking now, and to Dean and Sam Winchester, somehow the dawn seemed just a little bit brighter.

**The End**


End file.
